Bron Acquires JJ Bola’s Novel ‘The Selfless Act Of Breathing’; Keenan Scott II To Adapt

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: Bron Studios has snapped up rights to The Selfless Act of Breathing, the newly released novel by JJ Bola, to develop into a feature-length film.Playwright Keenan Scott II (Broadway’s Thoughts of a Colored Man) will adapt for the screen.The Selfless Act of Breathing follows Michael Kabongo, a British-Congolese teacher living in London on the cusp of two identities.

On paper, he seems to have it all: He’s beloved by his students, popular with his co-workers, and the pride and joy of a mother who emigrated from the Congo to the UK in search of a better life.

But behind closed doors, he’s been struggling with the overwhelming sense that he can’t address the injustices he sees raging before him – from his relentless efforts to change the lives of his students for the better to his attempts to transcend the violence and brutality that marginalizes young Black men around the world.Then one day he suffers a devastating loss, and his life is thrown into a tailspin.

Michael decides to spontaneously pack up and go to America, where he imagines everything will be better, easier — a place where he can become someone new, someone without a past filled with pain.