‘Suburban Fury,’ Award-Winning Doc About Would-Be Presidential Assassin Sara Jane Moore, To Get Oscar-Qualifying Release, National Theatrical Rollout

EXCLUSIVE: Argot Pictures will distribute Robinson Devor’s award-winning documentary Suburban Fury, qualifying the film for Oscar consideration ahead of a national rollout.

The distribution plan will have the documentary play at Alamo Drafthouse in Lower Manhattan from December 12-18, before a 2026 theatrical release across the country and at museums. The film, which won the top documentary prize at the Seattle International Film Festival, takes a fascinating look at Sara Jane Moore, the suburban housewife who bizarrely tried to assassinate President Ford in San Francisco in September 1975. She managed to squeeze off a shot from a .38 caliber revolver that missed Ford; she raised her arm to fire again but ax ex-Marine in the crowd, Oliver Sipple, managed to subdue her.

Suburban Fury examines how Moore became radicalized, a strange tale involving Patty Hearst, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Secret Service and the FBI.

“More than a historical retelling, the film is an intimate character study — and a chilling mirror of America’s ideological divide,” notes a release. “Framed around unprecedented access to Moore herself, it unfolds as a first-person monologue shot across the Bay Area sites where her radicalization took root. Blending rare archival footage with a stylized imagined exchange between Moore and her FBI handler, Suburban Fury traces her transformation from patriotic volunteer and government informant to disillusioned revolutionary with a gun in her hand.”

The release continues, “Fifty years later, Moore’s story feels eerily prescient — a reflection of how ordinary citizens can be swept into extremism, conspiracy, and rage. Suburban Fury doesn’t offer easy answers; instead, it immerses us in one woman’s unraveling and the country that mirrored her fracture.”

Argot Pictures, founded by Jim Browne in 2005, has distributed dozens of films, including Marshall Curry’s Academy Award-nominated Street Fight (about a young Cory Booker’s attempt to win election as mayor of Newark, NJ), John Pirozzi’s Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll; Throw Down Your Heart, a documentary about legendary banjo player Béla Fleck; Stacy Peralta’s Crips and Bloods: Made in America, and Leah Warshawski & Todd Soliday’s Big Sonia.

“I’ve been a great admirer of Robinson Devor’s work for a long time now,” Browne said in a statement, “and excited to work with him and the team on his extraordinary film, Suburban Fury.”

Moore speaks for herself in the film – sometimes in combative exchanges with the director.

“She yelled at me more than once off camera and on,” Devor told Deadline in an interview for our Doc Talk podcast. “But you’ve got to go through that a little bit if you want to get an interview like that.”

Many people who dealt with Moore back in the 1970s underestimated her – for instance, law enforcement interviewed her before the assassination attempt and concluded she posed no serious threat. Devor spoke with Moore for the film when she was 94, several years after she had completed a prison term of 32 years.

“She is a very vibrant, smart person, and I think that she’s a natural storyteller and a raconteur,” Devor told us. “She loves telling a good story, and she was trained, I guess a little while as an actress. So, she’s able to perform very well… I think she really understands how to control a conversation. I really think she has spent time with politicians understanding that you can give an answer and you can be telling the truth, but if you’re a few millimeters off the question, you’re not lying.”

Moore died on Sept. 24 at the age of 95, just days shy of the 50^th anniversary of her assassination attempt. The documentary sets the scene for that earlier era — a strange time in American and world history, when settled order seemed vulnerable to violent, concussive change.

“When you’re watching on the television and you’re seeing the individual hijacking jumbo jets, the individuals taking over an Olympic Games, or a few individuals that have this crazy audacity that they can actually get away with — because you really couldn’t quite get away with stuff like that today,” Devor observed. “It just seemed like [the times were] saying to people that, ‘Hey, if you’ve got a crazy way to upend the system, go for it.’ There was just so many people doing crazy things in that time period -bombings hijackings.”

Suburban Fury screens at DOC NYC on Tuesday, Nov. 18. It premiered last year at the New York Film Festival before going on to screen at SFFILM’s Doc Stories in San Francisco, as well as top festivals in Philadelphia, Seattle, Sonoma, CA, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and the Bentonville Film Festival in Arkansas.