Leave No Trace

So today was the first day of the film festival for me.  Although it does start on Friday,  I no longer go to any movies in the evenings, and have joined the pensioners who fill the seats during the day.  It suits me better in winter, and I am happier to be home at dinner time.  My friends who used to join me in evening movies, too expensive and too difficult to get parking in the evenings, so I am on a solo adventure which is fine with me.  I take my lunch and a good book and try to go out for a walk between sessions if the weather is fine.

Leave No Trace is a movie directed by Debra Granik who also directed Winter's Bone.  In this story we get to meet Tom and her father Will, who are living in a tent in the depths of a large urban park in Portland, Oregan.   Suffering from PTSD, Will is happier living away from everybody and all the challenges of modern life, yet Tom is challenged with this thinking as she is exposed to other ways of living.

I enjoyed this style of social realism, of seeing what looked like real people living real lives and both the main characters had a connection that made their relationship believable and you wanted to see what happened to them. I liked that it was an original story, without the cliches that you see in many films of this genre, that it avoided the  Hallmark movie cliches.   Thomasin Mckenzie is played by a young local actress from our town, so the cinema was full which was great.  We were also lucky enough to have the director attend the film festival session and she was there to answer a short Q & A after the movie.    A worthy start to the Film Festival fortnight.  4/5