The Florida Project

"Writer-director Sean Baker proved with Tangerine, his 2015 indie breakout smash about transgender hookers in Hollywood, that he could make a fizzing, incredibly fresh drama of street life with a camera setup comprising three iPhones. It wasn’t a gimmick any old director could have made work. As if to prove that he’s not beholden to one fixed aesthetic, Baker has cast this off completely for his new film, The Florida Project, switching to 35mm celluloid and the gifted Mexican cinematographer Alexis Zabe, who worked with Carlos Reygadas on the bewitchingly beautiful Silent Light and Post Tenebras Lux. The Florida Project absolutely sings as a visual achievement, and not only as that. Working again with co-writer Chris Bergoch, Baker has chosen for his setting a roadside strip-motel in Orlando, and turns it into the single most vivid location in recent movies."

— Tim Robey de The Telegraph

"A child’s sense of wonder is at the heart of Sean Baker’s joyful story of people living on the impoverished fringes of Florida’s tourist traps. Six-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Kimberly Prince) lives in the Magic Castle with her mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite), a dancer and chancer who makes ends meet any way she can – hawking wholesale perfume to rich resort customers, stealing theme park-entry passes from wide-eyed tourists, and more. Meanwhile Moonee and her trusty sidekick Scooty (Christopher Rivera) take time out from spit-bombing parked cars to befriend new kid on the block Jancey (Valeria Cotto). Together, they show Jancey around their wonderland home, taking us on a guided tour of the motel’s corridors, lifts and rooms (“the man who lives in here gets arrested a lot”), scamming ice-cream from the local Twistee Treat parlour (“The doctor says we have asthma and we gotta eat ice-cream right away!”), and occasionally shutting off the motel’s power supply for rascally giggles. It all adds up to another superbly sympathetic portrait of marginalised experience from a film-maker whose great triumph is that he never feels like a tourist. This is Moonee’s world, and for a couple of hours at least, we are privileged to live in it."

— Mark Kermode de The Guardian

"Quase sem sair de um pardieiro da Flórida, Sean Baker constroi uma polaroid à la minuta de uma realidade americana para a qual ninguém costuma olhar. Com uma miúda de seis anos a roubar o filme como quem não quer a coisa. É uma vitória de Baker que o filme não se torne panfleto social: dele e dos actores, sobretudo da “força da natureza” que é Brooklynn Prince, a miúda, e de Willem Dafoe, no papel do gerente do motel que percebe que estas pessoas são pessoas, são seres desamparados por uma sociedade que lhes prometeu ilusões e não foi capaz de lhes dar nada. Tudo sem que o filme pareça desesperado, é obra – e é um olhar sobre a América que merece ser arrumado ao lado do que Andrea Arnold fez com American Honey. Não por acaso, também este passou ao lado dos Óscares que lhe seriam melhor entregues."

— Jorge Mourinha de Público