The Sweet East

104 min.
Directed by Sean Price Williams
Starring Talia Ryder, Earl Cave, Simon Rex, Ayo Edebiri, Jeremy O. Harris, Jacob Elordi, Rish Shah

The mental, social, and political disarray of the United States, filmed like a game of hopscotch or a variation on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. High school student Lillian runs away while on a school trip and traverses the spectrum of contemporary radicalism and madness, from white supremacists to Islamic radicals, from neo-punks to woke avant-gardists. At every leg of her journey, she comes into contact with hermetic worlds, whose citizens rant and rave to each other, blissfully ignorant of their neighbors. A story at the crossroads of a traditional fairytale, a picaresque narrative, and 1970s New Hollywood.