Sean Price Williams explores the East Coast in this daring debut feature that was screened at Directors' Fortnight at Cannes.
Lillian (Talia Ryder from Never Rarely Sometimes Always), a high school student from South Carolina, travels to Washington on a class trip. Quickly bored, she goes on the run with Caleb, an anarchist who helps her escape from a bar where shooting breaks out. After a day with leftist activists, she meets Neo-Nazi university professor Lawrence (Simon Rex), who offers her a place to stay. However, Lillian soon gets bored of him too and goes off to explore New York on her own, unexpectedly starts a film career, and falls for a film star (Jacob Elordi). Will this extravagant adventure end well?
The Sweet East is the debut feature by Sean Price Williams, who previously worked on Good Time by the Safdie Brothers, the TV drama Trigonometry, and music videos for stars such as A$AP Rocky. As in movies that he shot for other directors, he uses a grainy 16 mm film that adds to Lillian’s journey a sense of mystery and a promise of miracles. The blurry image also resonates with the unromantic aspect of her adventure: the dark underside of American culture that the protagonist comes face-to-face with. The Sweet East only pretends to be a messy road movie about a lost teenager’s strange odyssey, where every encounter is stranger than the last. A satire of contemporary America, it is at the same time an ode to the society of contradiction, where obsessions with dubious idols go hand in hand with the boldness of dreamers.
The film will be screened in Arabic and English with Russian subtitles.
THE SWEET EAST
SEAN PRICE WILLIAMS
USA, 2023. 104 MIN. 18+