Goddamn, “Ballast” looks fantastic. We actually got the chills watching this trailer. There’s not an ounce of music in it and it feels totally arresting.
The indie Sundance winner is one we’ve been dying to see ever since we read about its description at the Utah-based film festival and then even moreso when it won the Sundance Best Dramatic Directing and Cinematography awards. Then it played at Sundance at BAM in Brooklyn in June and we missed that too, argh! The film finally arrives — in New York at least — on October 1st at Film Forum and then will presumably increase into other major markets.
Manohla Dargis of the NY Times called the Lance Hammer-directed film, “a startlingly assured, pitch-perfect first feature.” Newsweek’s David Ansen said the picture is a, “A poetically understated and beautifully shot movie about tragedy and reconciliation in the wintry Mississippi Delta… Hammer [explores] underclass African-American lives with grit, honesty and eyes wide open to life as it is actually lived, not as the movies have conditioned us to see it.”
A lot of people have compared it to the early work of David Gordon Green (especially his debut, “George Washington”), and franky, we’re not tired of seeing that kind of lyrical and honest, exploratory cinema.
The synopsis:
A young boy drifts through the spare flatlands of a wintry Mississippi township and a middle-aged man sits in his rural home, frozen in grief after his brother’s suicide. These striking images set in motion a riveting story of three people trying to reposition their lives after experiencing a traumatic loss. Lance Hammer won the best director award at the 2008 Sundance Film festival for his assured hand with which he tells a delicate, quietly unfolding story using understated means and non-professionals from the Mississippi Delta.
