What’s one of the most overlooked directorial debuts of this past decade? For my money, at the top of the list is Daniel Patrick Carbone’s “Hide Your Smiling Faces,” which debuted at the Berlin Film Festival and Tribeca Film Festival in 2013. A haunting and lyrical look at childhood adolescence—think early David Gordon Green and Terrence Malick with more anxiety and existential dread—“Hide Your Smiling Faces,” essentially about boys forced to grow up too fast, is as an assured debut as I’ve ever seen.
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In 2016, he co-directed “Collective:Unconscious,” an experimental anthology feature that had its world premiere at SXSW, and Carbone followed that up with a long-in-the-works documentary called “Phantom Cowboys” that was filmed over the course of nine years. About three teenage boys as they approach adulthood in California, West Virginia, and Florida, “Phantom Cowboys,” look at the hopes and dreams of young people in small town, often-disadvantaged America as expressed by these three boys. The doc debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival last year and is now coming out this month.
It’s a searing and gorgeous doc, lyrical and poetic like his debut, and similarly gut-punching and emotional. Here’s the official synopsis:
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From acclaimed director Daniel Patrick Carbone comes a fascinating and poetic longitudinal study of growing up in America. Filmed over the course of 9 years, we meet Nick, Larry, and Tyler three boys from around the country as they move from boys to men in rural America in the parts of the country that are slowly getting lost to time. From the deserts of California, to the sugarcane fields of Florida, to the backwoods of West Virginia, Carbone offers an intimate and deeply resonant portrait of finding yourself in a constantly changing world.
With the gracefully moving “Phantom Cowboys” Carbone once again looks at boyhood but via the sometimes-difficult transition to adulthood in places where opportunity is a forgotten word. The Tribeca Film Festival said, “’ Phantom Cowboys’ captures the consistent threads of responsibility, parenthood, and manhood that weigh on each of these small-town teenagers, regardless of the community that raised him. Carbone reconnects with each young man years after their first encounters, allowing his audience to observe how their ambitions evolve after just a few years on their own.”
“Phantom Cowboys” debuts across iTunes and Amazon Prime on March 29 via Film Sales. Watch the trailer, exclusively, right here.