"The Florida Project"

"The Magic Castle" is the name of one of the numerous roadside motels on the outskirts of Orlando in the US state of Florida. The promising name, however, no more than the façade painted in bright Zum Inhalt: pastels, is powerless to distract from the crumbling state of the complex – not to mention the fact that holiday-makers seldom stray here. Built for visitors to the nearby Walt Disney World resort, the motel has long since become the permanent home of people in precarious circumstances. The Zum Inhalt: setting of "The Florida Project" reflects the features of a two-class society with bitter irony: access to the amusement park – that emblematic place where children’s dreams come true – is, of course, denied to the people living in the motels.

Growing Up on the Fringes of Society

The six-year-old Moonee lives here with her mother Halley. They are close to the poverty line. Halley is in her early twenties and has just been made unemployed. Her hair is dyed neon blue, she is usually scantily clad and she is covered in tattoos. In addition to a very carefree attitude to life, she has also passed on a generous portion of chutzpah to her daughter. The energetic Monee’s loud mouth always ensures her a leading role among her friends from the neighbouring apartments. While Halley tries to keep her head above water by selling bootleg perfume to vacationers, the children spend their days wandering the neighbourhood. Begging for ice cream or firing spit-bombs at cars parked in the motel lot is the norm for them. Once, they even light a fire in a derelict building.

The only one who tries to limit the damage is motel manager Bobby, played by Willem Dafoe, the only star in the movie’s ensemble, which is otherwise populated by amateur actors. He tirelessly corrects the children and tries to warn Halley about the potential consequences of her negligence and to protect her from them. Despite the need for sternness, Bobby‘s behaviour is marked by a loving goodwill toward his tenants. Still, his influence has its limits. When the mother of Scooty, Moonee‘s best friend, realises what a questionable influence Halley has on the two children, she reports her to the youth welfare authorities.

A US Movie in Stark Contrast with Hollywood

As an independent film, "The Florida Project" made do with the relatively modest budget of three million dollars. Without the shackles of working for the big studios, the production methods employed by director Sean Baker guarantee the greatest possible freedom with regard to both content and form. With his treatment of the so-called "hidden homeless" – people of no fixed abode who are not officially registered as homeless – he focuses on a marginalized group that also remains largely invisible in US society. Prior to making the movie, Baker had conducted extensive research in the dilapidated motel complexes around Disney World Orlando, where the film was also shot. However, "The Florida Project" does not tell the story of its protagonists’ plight in the form of a social-realist drama. Baker neither sketches a sob story of poverty and deprivation, nor does he resort to the problematic clichés often used to describe the milieu that has come to be known by the pejorative term "White Trash".

The Children’s Perspective

Instead, the film’s Zum Inhalt: staging of a different America adopts the perspective of its six-year-old protagonist. Her mother’s daily struggle for survival seems like a game from Moonee‘s carefree perspective and her inhospitable surroundings on the fringes of society, between outlet stores and souvenir shops, seem more like a sun-kissed adventure playground that rivals Disney’s "Magic Kingdom". Baker and his camera operator Alexis Zabé usually frame the picture at the children’s Zum Inhalt: eye level. They underline the fantasy nature of the often scurrilous settings with an exaggeratedly synthetic colour scheme made up of matching lilac and turquoise tones. Extremely Zum Inhalt: wide-angle lenses, which lead to a somewhat distorted look, make the images seem a step further away from reality.

Harsh Reality in Cheerful Colours

Many of the Zum Inhalt: scenes in the movie are snapshots that mainly serve to breathe life into the magic of the children’s world portrayed. Their stark contrast with reality is a source of Zum Inhalt: tension. Thus, the subtext of the movie increasingly hints that the hard facts of reality will eventually catch up with the protagonists. When the youth welfare authorities step in and threaten to separate Halley and Moonee, "The Florida Project" reaches its thunderous and ambiguous climax. As they flee together, Moonee and her friend Jancey make it to the centre of the hitherto unattainable Disney World, the "Magic Castle".

Baker makes the Zum Inhalt: final sequence stand out from the rest of the film with a radical aesthetic break, in which he even changes medium: the rich colour tones of the analogue 35-mm film make way for the harsh of a smartphone. This decision originally had a totally pragmatic reason. Because the crew was filming without permission in Disney World, it had to act unobtrusively. We can also see it as a filmic strategy that questions the status of what is portrayed. Is it purely wishful thinking? What chance does Moonee have in reality? It seems that a happy ending to this story is only possible in children’s imaginations.