The Florida Project was released in 2017 and was directed by Sean Baker, best known for his breakout indie hit Tangerine (2015), and stars Bria Vinaite as Halley, the mother of Moonee, played by Brooklyn Prince. The film is set in and around the motels near Disneyland in Florida, and is told through the perspective of Moonee, a child below the poverty line living in a low star hotel, oblivious to the misdeeds and debauchery that her mother gets up to just to pay the rent and live her lifestyle. The beautiful thing for me about this film for me, and what makes it one of my favourite films of all time, is how these heartbreaking situations these kids face can be told in such a human and relatable way that you can’t help but engage with it, and enjoy every second of it. How real everything feels. There are many reasons for this, but the two I am going to touch on today are the small perspectives and small castings (see what I did there, see how I related it to Small Things).
The Florida Project is mainly told from the perspective of Moonee. This is explicitly told through her screentime in her film, and how we always come back to her for key plot points and moments. However, this is told implicitly through low angles and how the camera is framed around her and other kids. The story is told from the eyes of little people, children. The camera is always intentionally low in scenes of The Florida Project, keeping a tight frame around Moonee at her eye level, and often cutting off the torsos and heads of adults. An example of that is shown below.
This is representative of the innocence and ignorance of a child during adult and intense situations like the ones in the film. In the scene above, Halley is trying to sell a family pass to Disneyland to a passing stranger. During this scene, we mainly sit at this angle, following Moonee as she dances around, mimicking what her mother says, feeling like she is helping. We don’t see the full frame, because Moonee doesn’t see the bigger picture. She doesn’t know that what her mother is doing is illegal, and she certainly doesn’t know what we find out later in the scene, which is that Halley stole these from a client when she used her property to prostitute herself. We, like Moonee, are left down in the unknown, wondering what is going on, like when the ‘adults are talking’, that blissful ignorance so apparent in a child’s life.
Furthermore, Baker does an incredible job highlighting how big and magical the world is for a child, and how even the more depressing and dreary of places to an adult seem like wonderlands to a child. A great example of that is in the shot below.
We can barely make out the kids, walking alongside this massive store, with such a vibrant and enticing exterior. This sense of scale shows how small these kids really are, both physically and metaphorically in the grand scheme of this world. What is a tacky Orlando gift shop, ripping off Disney product in an attempt to profit off their properties is seen as a grandiose and larger than life attraction in their lives. This sense of a smaller perspective is heightened in the casting for the film.
Sean Baker makes the characters in The Florida Project feel so real, relatable and small scale through his casting choices. This was both Bria and Brooklyn’s breakout films, and the story of how Bria came to be in this film is really quite inspiring. Baker was searching throughout Hollywood to find someone to play Halley, this full of life teenage mother who embraced the more childlike aspects of her personality, which in this film, become a detriment to her. He was unimpressed with what he had seen so far, but was in awe of how the attitude of a relatively small influencer on Instagram was so similar to that of his imagined character. This personality was Bria Vinaite, and with what started as a small exchange, ended up being the breakthrough of her career, landing her various gigs post the film’s production. This lack of emphasis on stardom makes the characters of Moonee and Halley feel so real. We haven’t seen these people play anything but these characters. We believe they are these characters through masterful writing and structure. From small and humble beginnings, rose masterpieces.
The Florida Project to me is one of the most influential pieces of media when I think about how I want to make films. Its story is told through short and small interconnected scenes, fleshing out these characters and the world around them. And it wouldn’t be anywhere without its’ small things.
The Florida Project. (2017). [film] Directed by S. Baker. USA: A24.