The Florida Project - the beautiful film at the center of this month's program - is situated within a multi-apartment building with many neighbors, a kind of motel or housing. The residents live on the edge of Disney's vast amusement park in Florida. This structure plays a central role in the characterizing the heroines, in describing the relationship between them and in creating the atmosphere, and serves as a secondary, but significant hero in the film: a bubble that protects its heroines and enables them to distance themselves from the world and the reality outside it.
The program we present this month showcases a series of films which like The Florida Project take place in the world of housing projects. The projects are homes to ordinary people, its repetitive structures are a testament to the routine and its simple materials express the mundane. Cinema enjoys using this starting point to suggest dramatic moves that consist primarily of escaping the labels associated with this setting, to say that beneath the occult hides something else. And so behind its windows are dreamers, peeping men, children who fantasize of other worlds, boys in love or those who sink into crime. Housing projects are the land from which this fantasy or nightmare grows. The significance of these narrative moves stems from the way in which the housing project is shaped, and the way of escape or redemption depends on the baggage attributed to it. The films presented in this program move on this axis, where the housing project can be a crime scene or a house of love, and The Florida Project surely belongs to the most compassionate opposite: a comforting family place, if only its heroines can survive and continue to live there.
