CINEOS Premiere
The Florida Project
A summer of childhood anarchy in a budget motel in the shadow of Disney World — joyful and kinetic, until it quietly becomes one of the most heartbreaking films about poverty ever made.
It disarms you before it wounds you. The first two acts are warm and physically pleasurable — childhood chaos has real joy — and only in the third does the discomfort accumulate, retroactively reframing that earlier ease as complicity. The grief it finally deposits is specific and irreversible: the weight of watching a child too young to grasp what is happening to her. A last-minute sprint into fantasy offers a partial release, but Baker withholds the full mechanism, so the ache reasserts itself the moment the credits fall.
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FAQ
Is it a sad film the whole way through?
No — that's what makes it devastating. Most of it is bright, funny, full of a child's mischief. The sadness sneaks in underneath and only lands its full weight at the very end.
Why is so much shot from a child's height?
Because the world is filtered through a six-year-old's radius — three motels, a parking lot, a waffle house. You understand only what she can, which is exactly why the ending hits so hard.