Viewer Advice: Strong impact themes and inclusion of an outdated slur.

Famed indie cinematographer Sean Price Williams makes his feature directorial debut with this freewheeling picaresque trip through the cliques and communes of today’s USA.

Listless and easily repulsed Lillian is on a school trip to Washington, DC. Separated from her classmates, she finds herself on a feverish journey through the eastern seaboard, falling into the orbit (or trap) of various freaks and interlopers who call this great nation home: predatory professors, vampiric filmmakers, white supremacists and rich kids cosplaying as anarchists. The teen is open to play-acting at each leg, and what results is a darkly satirical road movie that takes the temperature of modern America with gleeful irreverence.

Williams’s glorious, grainy lensing – previously seen in films such as the Safdie brothers’ Good Time (MIFF 2017), MIFF 2022 favourite Funny Pages, Golden Exits (MIFF 2017) and more – is on full display here, depicting Lillian’s encounters with tactile dreaminess. Complementing this visual appeal is a superb cast, with lead Talia Ryder (Never Rarely Sometimes Always) joined by Simon Rex (Red Rocket), Ayo Edebiri (Theater Camp, MIFF 2023; The Bear), playwright Jeremy O Harris and Australia’s own Jacob Elordi (Euphoria). Screening straight from Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and penned by film critic Nick Pinkerton, The Sweet East is chatty, compulsive, always unpredictable and hilarious in its mayhem.

“A patchwork quilt of curiosity, connection, and unadulterated strangeness … whose deeply engaging script and story morphs Alice in Wonderland into an Americana dreamscape.” – /Film

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Screenwriter Nick Pinkerton will be in attendance for the screenings on Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 August. He will also appear in the free MIFF Talks event Eyes on America: From Documentary to Satire & In Between on Saturday 5 August.