Skip Day
2018 · 18m · USA
Directed by Ivete Lucas, Patrick Bresnan
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
High school seniors from Pahokee, a predominantly African-American industrial town on Florida's Lake Okeechobee, skip school the Monday after prom to drive sixty miles to the Atlantic shoreline. Using a direct-cinema approach, the film observes their rites-of-passage gathering as they contemplate their futures and navigate subtle tensions around race and belonging.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Illy Prize at Directors' Fortnight, Cannes. Pahokee seniors driving 60 miles to the beach the Monday after prom. Bresnan and Lucas's vérité is the real article — restrained observation, racial exclusion in unremarked moments. This is documentary the way I want it.
A third film in Lucas and Bresnan's Pahokee trilogy, this Illy Award–winning Directors' Fortnight selection exemplifies the long-form observational tradition at its most precise — small gestures, large consequences.
Lucas & Bresnan capture racial exclusion at a Florida beach through unremarked observational moments rather than confrontation — vérité restraint as moral form. Illy Prize at Cannes Directors' Fortnight, and earned.
Festivals
- Cannes Film Festival – Quinzaine des Réalisateurs (Directors' Fortnight) 2018, Illy Short Film Award
- Curta Cinema – Rio de Janeiro International Short Film Festival 2018, Best Directing Award
- Denver Film Festival 2018, Best Documentary Short
- Doc En Court 2018, Grand Prix & Special Mention of the Student Jury