Sunnyland

I love both indie and big budget "Slow Cinema" - films that are quiet, contemplative, moody, meditative, often with little dialogue (First Cow, Return to Dust, Bull, The Piano, Barry Lyndon, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Days of Heaven readily come to mind). These style characteristics are perfectly fine with me, as long as I get a slice of life that's insightful, moves me and am compelled to finish watching. I don't like to give a bad review to a filmmaker's feature debut, but Sunnyland for me was a slow and very painful BORE. I forced myself to finish watching out of respect for the effort but was never rewarded with any glimmer of depth, insight or sadly, even empathy. I was hoping for something close to the brilliance of Sean Baker's The Florida Project but this film didn't even come close. I can't come up with any reason to recommend it.

It's no easy feat to capture the enigmatic, dreamlike magic of childhood in movie form, but Xavi Medina does just that with his feature debut. The filmmaker wrote, directed, shot, and edited this tale of five-year-old EZ (Isabella Wilkie), who lives in a Miami trailer park and has one simple goal in life: to see the ocean for the first time. Medina's ambling and contemplative cinema-verité style recalls the hazy, colorful wonderment of Sean Baker's The Florida Project (MVFF40), accentuated by an incisive undercurrent of poverty and the immigrant experience. In this tender drama's focus on EZ's boundless imagination, and in its insightful compassion for inattentive parents simply doing the best they can, Sunnyland brims with its own unique humanity - setting Medina apart as one to watch. -Aurora Amidon.