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One film IndieWire’s been talking about since early 2025 is Todd Wiseman Jr.’s dystopian debut feature “The School Duel.” The black-and-white satirical thriller debuted at the Deauville American Film Festival with screenings at the Miami and Sunscreen film festivals in Florida, where Wiseman’s film picked up a raft of awards.
Wiseman’s film takes place in a Florida without gun control, where a televised competition offers a dark answer to the epidemic of school shootings. Think an indie “Hunger Games” meets “The Purge” in this twisted debut, out from Altered Innocence in theaters this Spring. IndieWire debuts the trailer exclusively below.
More on the film courtesy of its synopsis: “In a near-future Florida where gun control has been abolished, the state’s ambitious governor (Oscar Nuñez, ‘The Office’) introduces a chilling solution to school shootings: a state-wide, televised fight-to-the-death competition known as ‘The School Duel.’ Sammy, a troubled 13-year-old, secretly enlists against his mother’s wishes — seduced by promises of purpose, patriotism, and notoriety. But as the deadly spectacle unfolds, that dream begins to crumble. The debut feature from director Todd Wiseman Jr., ‘The School Duel’ is a provocative dystopian thriller about fear, manipulation, and one of the most brazenly political genre films in recent memory.”
Wiseman was raised in Tampa, Florida, before heading to the film program at New York University. Credits include producing the Emmy- and IDA-nominated Netflix short documentary “Long Shot,” which followed the real-life story of how footage from “Curb Your Enthusiasm” was used to clear a man wrongly accused of murder. He shot “The School Duel” in his hometown and largely around the Tampa Bay area.
As IndieWire previously wrote, the film stars “The Office” alum Oscar Núñez “in a decidedly laugh-free role: as the Florida governor who believes he is actually morally righteous in holding the School Duel. A first-look image from the film of him holding an AR-15 went viral on Reddit recently. It also stars Christina Brucato (‘The Menu’) in an especially moving turn as Samuel’s mother, rising actor-musician Frankie Midnight as the game marshal, and character actor Michael Sean Tighe (‘Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl’), who recruits Samuel for the School Duel and serves as a kind of twisted mentor to him, as well as actual ‘Hunger Games’ alum Eugenie Bondurant as the principal of Samuel’s school.”
“The School Duel” opens in theaters Friday, April 24. Check out the film’s newest trailer, an IndieWire exclusive, below.
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