Two-time Academy Award winner Mahershala Ali is executive producing and plans to star in prison drama "Solitary" for Fox Searchlight.

The specialty label has bought the movie rights to Albert Woodfox's 2019 memoir about the 43 years he spent in solitary confinement in Louisiana's Angola Prison. The book’s full title is “Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades In Solitary Confinement, My Story of Transformation and Hope.” The project is in the early stages of development without a director or screenwriter attached.

That is the longest stretch in the U.S. for a kind of incarceration that has roundly been denounced as being inhumane. It amounted to 23 hours in a 6-by-9 foot cell, with an hour a day in a fenced concrete "exercise yard", but always alone. He drew that sentence following the 1972 murder of a prison guard that he has steadfastly denied committing.

Mahershala Ali is attaching to be executive producer of the film, with the intention to play Woodfox, whom he met in New Orleans recently after reading the book.

Source: Press Release