Friday, 01 February 2019: The Florida Project
Friday, 01 February 2019, 20:00
Venue: (see Locations and Tickets for further details)
Programme category: Forest Row Film Society
Director: Sean Baker, USA 2017, 111 mins, 15
“It’s hard to describe The Florida Project in a way that conveys its greatness without making it sound maudlin and sentimental …. It is a film of small notes that combine to form something major, the kind of movie that sneaks up on you and sticks with you…. Of course, it helps Baker greatly that he found a future star in Brooklynn Prince, who gives one of the best child performances in years. She’s so genuine that you forget that Moonee is a character, falling completely into her life as if it’s true…. There’s no romanticism of these lives, and yet there’s never a sense of drudgery either. It’s a breathtaking balance of the two that really makes the movie work, and it culminates in a final scene of striking beauty—the kind that you don’t soon forget.” rogerebert.com
A superbly subtle and sympathetic portrait of the people who live on the impoverished dysfunctional fringes of Disney World; it revolves around the chaotic adventures of six-year-old Moonee and her friends, for whom almost everything is a source of wonder.
“The Florida Project is a song of innocence and of experience: mainly the former. It is a glorious film in which warmth and compassion win out over miserabilism or irony, painted in bright blocks of sunlit colour like a child’s storybook…. This also has the best child acting I have seen for years; in its humour and its unforced and almost miraculous naturalism it reminded me of British examples like Ken Loach’s Kes or Bryan Forbes’s Whistle Down the Wind.” Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
