Screening

About Pahokee

Rating:

Not rated Not rated

Year Released:

2019

Format:

Virtual

Genres:

Documentary

Metadata:

Directed by Ivete Lucas, Patrick Bresnan

In a small agricultural town in the Florida Everglades, hopes for the future are concentrated on the youth. Four teens face heartbreak and celebrate in the rituals of an extraordinary senior year of high school. Directors Ivete Lucas and Patrick Bresnan create a detailed and incredibly nuanced portrait of Pahokee, a tightly knit rural community that struggles with financial insecurities and a bleak future. Through an extremely precise observational approach, the film manages to capture the daily life of the town with a great wealth of nuanced details. From sports events to school beauty contests, the filmmakers observe how, through social and collective rituals, the ideas of gender and identity are publicly displayed while creating new narratives. A complex and multilayered work that recalls also both the gritty social realism of the new American cinema as well as the neorealist touch. Pahokee is a powerful portrait of a forgotten America absent from the current political discourse. Variety’s Guy Lodge declared the film “lively and rousing as a generational snapshot, buoyed by the lovable, resilient kids at its heart."