The Florida Project
Sean Baker watches a little girl named Moonee tear through a Florida motel summer with chaotic joy while her mother fights to keep their lives from collapsing and the contrast is impossible to bear.
What it is about
A young girl explores a Florida motel neighbourhood while her mother struggles to keep them housed.
A childhood at the edge of the kingdom
Brooklynn Prince plays Moonee as if the camera is simply lucky to be there. She runs, yells, schemes, and melts down with total conviction in every frame, and Sean Baker shoots it all at kid height so you feel exactly what it is to be six years old.
The children in this film are not performing poverty. They turn a condemned building and a parking lot into a kingdom and Baker never condescends to them or to the adults trying to hold things together around them.
Willem Dafoe plays Bobby the motel manager as a man who protects these kids with quiet, stubborn dignity, and his performance is the film’s moral anchor. The ending arrives like something you cannot look away from and cannot quite believe.