Magical world of Disney as seen from the gutter
Perth Film Society (PFS) puts on a film about young girls surviving in an uncaring world by wit and cunning.
‘The Florida Project’ is the next film shown by PFS, with Fair City film lovers taking their seats in the NorieMiller Studio, Perth Concert Hall on Thursday, February 21.
‘The Florida Project’ (cert 15) is a 2017 American drama, directed by Sean Baker, and written with Chris Bergoch.
The film is named after an early version of Walt Disney World, which is near where the film is set.
Six-year-old Monique, aka Moonee (Brooklynn Kimberly Prince), and her rebellious young mother Halley (Bria Vinaite) live in the ‘Magic Castle’ motel in Kissimmee, Florida.
Halley is a dancer and chancer who struggles to make ends meet any way she can – hawking perfume to rich resort customers, stealing tourists’ theme park entry passes, and much, much worse.
The motel manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe), has a soft spot for the children but Halley, Moonee and her friends are the bane of Bobby’s existence.
Unsupervised, Moonee spends her summer with her friends, stealing, engaging in mischief and other more disruptive pranks like shutting off the motel’s power supply just for laughs.
However, things change after Florida’s department of children and families finds out that the friends set fire to an abandoned apartment. Moonee runs away from the threat of foster care . A child’s sense of wonder is at the heart of this joyful story of people living on the impoverished fringes of Florida’s tourist traps.
The film builds into a superbly sympathetic portrait of a marginalised life from a film-maker whose great triumph is that he never feels like a tourist or a voyeur.
This is Moonee’s world and, for a couple of hours at least, we are privileged to live in it.
Described by critics as hysterically rude and visually stunning (The Telegraph), and a film that’ll make you wince at times but that you’ll not soon forget (The Chicago Sun-Times).
‘The Florida Project’ was chosen by the National Board of Review and American Film Institute as one of the top 10 films of the year.
Brooklynn Kimberly Prince won the Critics’ Choice Movie Award for best young performer, and The Washington Post rates Dafoe’s performance as his finest in recent memory, bringing to levelheaded, unsanctimonious life a character who offers a glimmer of hope and caring within a world that is markedly short on both.
Tickets cost £6, concessions £5, available on the door or in advance from 01738 621031.
Perth Film Society offers three more films this season, ‘Nae Pasaran’, ‘A Ciamra’, and ‘The Breadwinner’.