The Florida Project, set in a cheap motel near Disney, is one of the best films of the year. (2024)

Sean Baker’s 2015 film Tangerine first garnered attention at its Sundance premiere for having been shot entirely on an iPhone. But those who watched it quickly discovered it was also a fine piece of subversive, madcap, empathetic filmmaking — a story set on the sidewalks and in the alleys and all-night doughnut shops of Los Angeles, with prostitutes and pimps as its carefully drawn romantic leads.

And now, with The Florida Project — one of the most highly buzzed-about films at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section — Baker’s skill as a loving humanist chronicler of America’s garish forgotten places has ripened into something truly marvelous.

This time the setting is Kissimmee, Florida, just south of Orlando, in a purple-painted $35-a-night motel called the “Magic Castle.” Its name is a riff on Walt Disney World (leading to one of the film’s most hilarious scenes), as is everything along the strip it’s located on: trashy trinket shops for tourists, many of them offering discounted passes and cheaper Disney souvenirs than you can buy in the parks.

The Magic Castle is home to people who have nowhere else to go, including young mom Halley (Bria Vinaite) and her daughter Moonee (Brooklynn Prince). To Moonee and her friends Scooty (Christopher Rivera), Dicky (Aiden Malik), and Jancey (Valeria Cotto), the Magic Castle is kind of like a Disney World stand-in. Dirt poor and without much in the way of supervision, they spend their days sprinting around and getting into mischief. They beg for money at a local ice cream stand and share a cone. They watch TV with their parents. They explore fluorescent-colored abandoned condos nearby.

The Florida Project unfolds at first like a series of sketches about the characters who live in the motel, held together by the hysterical antics of Moonee and her pack as well as long-suffering hotel manager Bobby (a splendid, warm Willem Dafoe), who tries to put up with it all while keeping some kind of order. But as the film goes on, a narrative starts to form, one that chronicles with heartbreaking detail the sorts of dilemmas that poor parents and their children face in America, and the broken systems that try to add structure to impossible situations.

This kind of social realist, vérité-style filmmaking has been part of cinema almost from its beginning, reaching peaks in Italian neorealism (1948’s Bicycle Thieves) and the French New Wave (1959’s The 400 Blows). It’s been on the rise in the United States for about decade, with films like Ramin Bahrani’s Chop Shop (2007) and Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy (2008) employing a natural and semi-observational style that focuses on characters and situations rather than heavy-handed plots to tell their stories about America’s downtrodden poor. Because they don’t signal their intentions right away, the critiques in films like these tend to sneak up on the audience and sock them from behind, making them especially emotionally powerful.

The Florida Project works in this vein as well. But there’s an especially American flavor to what Baker is doing. He melds truly devastating stories that have no clear solution or moral lesson for their characters with humor, warmth, and depictions of excess that expose how darkly funny the American appetite for excess really is.

Marc Schmidt

Tangerine was all about flamboyance and drag; in The Florida Project, the excess surrounding Disney World offers a similar spectacle, all lightness and entertainment to let people look away from grimmer realities.

But The Florida Project won’t let us look away. Nor, given its brilliance, would we want to. Instead, we laugh, we watch silently, and we’re challenged to stop simplifying people's lives so we can offer easy theoretical answers.

The Florida Project premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival in May, made its North American debut at the Toronto International Film Festival, and opens in US theaters on October 6.