George Washington

This feels like swimming in the shallower end of an ocean, but when you go further out, the depth suddenly plummets, like an incredibly steep staircase, and you suddenly can't place your feet onto a surface. When you squint through your goggles, you don't get the reassurance of looking at an all-encompassing beige sand with various crabs or snails or lobsters, but just an enveloping, grotesque, uncaring, and muted navy blue that tells you that there is no end. 

So you turn around, paddle back to the shallow end, and find immense relief and gratitude at the feeling of sand hitting your heels when you take a step.

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David Gordon Green's George Washington eloquently explores structural claims about American social relations by closely observing their effects on children who have no choice but to repeatedly take the world's punches to the chin and somehow get back up. At the same time, the film recognizes the difficulty of just being a child, living in an adult-run world where you may face questions and events you don't know how to fully process and only half understand. Braiding the two together results in heartbreak, reflection, and a film that pushes the viewer to be conscious of what is truly entailed by both the effects and causes of poverty and communal neglect.