@2026 by mezzanine film, inc.
THE SWEET EAST
directed by Sean Price Williams
2023, U.S., 104m, DCP
L.A. premiere and opening night of a weeklong theatrical engagement, followed by a Q&A with director Sean Price Williams.
Friday, January 26
Landmark Nuart
11272 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90025
doors: 7pm
film: 7:30pm
The directorial debut from stalwart American cinematographer Sean Price Williams is a shapeshifting road movie for the 21st century -- a picaresque provocation in the vein of Harmony Korine’s deceptively airheaded Spring Breakers and the no-one-is-spared satires of Paul Verhoeven. The Sweet East features a star turn from Talia Ryder as a gracefully bored college student who finds herself on the run in a tri-state area of radicals, roughnecks, perverts and independent filmmakers (portrayed by rising stars Simon Rex, Ayo Edebiri, Jeremy O. Harris and others), each of whom tries and fails to corrupt her into joining their respective cults. Written by the film critic Nick Pinkerton, the film's discursive structure portrays America as a huckster playground informed by the dark underbelly of film history, much as it retains a dogged optimism about the haunted and desperate strivers who populate it. A Utopia Films release
Official Selection: Cannes Film Festival, Director's Fortnight, 2023
"The Sweet East is as rigorously digressive as its author’s (best) film criticism, stringing together relevant references to a host of American iconoclasts and styling each of Lillian’s (mis)adventures as exercises in projection wherein her acquaintances—be they crusty vegan “artivists,” sad-sack domestic terrorists, trendy independent filmmakers, It Boy movie stars, or Butthole Surfers (a quick visit by Gibby Haynes)—treat the pretty, vacant interloper as a blank canvas for their artistic ambitions and/or sexual desires (and, given the general influence of Lolita, these things are usually implied to be one and the same)." -Adam Nayman, Cinema Scope