- Phillip W.
- Friday, June 24, 2022
This weekly blog series, published each Friday evening, features five films from streaming services which you can access for free using your library card.
These films showcase our varying experiences with untamed places and our own wildness. They show nature as both refuge and menace, foreboding and nourishing. It’s a place to get lost and a place of remembrance. These films also examine our bonds to one another, and explore how these bonds can be both continuous and in conflict with the places where we create home.
All of the films below are available through kanopy.
Leave No Trace
Ben Foster and Thomasin Harcourt-MacKenzie play a father-daughter team in this story of trauma, survival, and family ties. Will (Foster) and Tom (Harcourt-MacKenzie) live off the grid in a public park in Portland, only contacting the larger world for food and supplies. When their camp is found, a new life begins to take shape; but Will and Tom’s paths diverge as visions for their respective futures conflict.
The Florida Project
Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) and her mother Hallee (Bria Vinaite) live in the Magic Castle motel outside the happiest place on earth - Disney World. Hallee provides for Moonee and does her best to create a life in which she is protected from their day-to-day realities, realities that become increasingly desperate. Although this film doesn't deal with nature in a traditional sense, Moonee and her friends transform the materials of their lived environment into something adventurous and extraordinary.
Daughters of the Dust
The first film by an African-American woman distributed theatrically in the US, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust is full of visual lyricism and breathtaking shots of the Sea Islands. Through the voice of a future descendant, it tells the story of the Peazant family of St. Simons Island, Georgia, their connection to one another, their history and place. The film also contrasts the urge of the young to embrace modernity with the need to preserve memory and heritage.
Winter’s Bone
The second film directed by Debra Granik on this list (along with Leave No Trace), Winter’s Bone tells the story of Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), a teenager living in the Ozarks and struggling to care for her younger siblings in a hand-to-mouth existence. When their absent father fails to appear for a court date, putting their home in peril, Ree sets out on a fraught path to find him.
Hunt for the Wilderpeople
In this comedic and heartfelt film, Julian Dennison plays Ricky, a delinquent boy that has been shuffled through the New Zealand foster system, only to find himself on the rugged doorstep of his new parents with one last chance. After fleeing into the New Zealand bush with his adoptive father, Uncle Hec (Sam Neill), they become the famed targets of a nationwide manhunt, forging bonds with one another to survive.