Director’s Statement

When we first read the novel on which it’s based, The Fighter, we were immediately struck by its portrait of the Mississippi Delta’s dramatic landscape, its rich history and humanity, both brutal and tender, and its singular through-line of a broken man’s final chance at redemption.

Just like the Delta that bore him, the present state of Jack Boucher is a telling shadow of his hard past. A bare-knuckle fighter wandering wanted through the unforgiving landscape, Jack is defined by relics of his past: his physical pain, his broken mind, his debts, and his childhood — his early abandonment and the rare love he holds for his foster mother, Maryann, who raised him from the age of twelve. At its core, this is a story of the love between a mother and a son, no matter how they came to be.