Sundance 2024 | Chiwetel Ejiofor reframes a life in biographical drama ‘Rob Peace’

Chiwetel Ejiofor had read Jeff Hobbs’ “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace” years before Antoine Fuqua asked if he might consider writing and directing an adaptation. His story did not fit neatly into familiar tropes about rough beginnings, incarcerated fathers or overly simplistic ideas about success and “getting out.” This was a person who wanted to remain tied to his community, to his father, and also to succeed in his schooling and athletics first at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School in Newark and then at Yale where he studied molecular biochemistry and biophysics. But Hobbs and, subsequently, Ejiofor saw something more complicated and nuanced about the flawed idea of “social mobility” and about the “confluence of race, housing, education and the criminal justice system.” And, most importantly, he felt like he hadn’t seen these ideas engaged with in film. “It was clear that humanistic approach to storytelling was a perfect fit to bring Rob’s life to screen.” Rob Peace is having its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday, where it hopes to find a distributor to get it out to the world.