The Florida Project

The Florida Project (2017) is Sean Baker's drama you can watch online on iFILM. It plays out not inside Disney World but across the highway from it, in a cheap lavender-walled motel where the families who can't afford the magic kingdom live week to week behind thin doors.

Six-year-old Moonee spends her summer the way only a kid can: cadging change from tourists, spitting off balconies onto parked cars, torching an abandoned house, and never quite noticing that her young mother Halley can barely scrape together the rent. Brooklynn Prince plays her with zero trace of acting, while Willem Dafoe is Bobby, the motel manager who grumbles at his tenants and quietly shields them all the same. Baker cast mostly first-timers, finding several of them on Instagram.

The film hands you poverty through a child's eyes, where a sun-bleached parking lot becomes a full kingdom of adventure. Its closing minutes were shot on an iPhone and land like a gut punch. Dafoe earned an Oscar nomination, and the picture swept dozens of critics' awards. A hundred and eleven minutes with no lecture attached. Stream The Florida Project (2017) online on iFILM.