Hello! Here’s another one!
The Florida Project explores the life of motel families through this gorgeous piece of story-telling. The film mostly follows children protagonists, and situates itself in a sort of suspension between the harsh socioeconomic realities and imaginative whimsy of the young characters.
**SPOILERS**
It might prove challenging to teach certain aspects of the film. Specifically, an adult character provides for her child through sex work – it is never shown on screen, but is implied. Otherwise, this film could be used to explore how marginalized childhoods are represented in film, the stigmatization of sex-work (challenging content though), and socioeconomic disparity through the critique of big powerhouses like Disneyworld and the exploitation of its workers. Bonus: it’s also just aesthetically beautiful!
This movie is on my list, thank you for putting this up, it sounds fantastic. The thought about sex work and bringing this into the classroom made me think of a moment in my Law 12 class when we talked about prostitution. My teacher asked us what factors would make someone want to work in the sex industry and then whether we thought sex work should be legal or illegal. We ended up thinking it should not be illegal and stigmas I may have picked up as a kid around sex work were forever altered. I had never really thought about this before we talked about it in class, instead previous held beliefs were pervasive and went unquestioned. Well this content is not something everyone would feel comfortable talking about, I think humanizing and thinking about decisions made by people and what contribute to these decisions is a super important way to have students think through stigmatized identities in society. In other words I think some really worthwhile stuff would come out of this!!!! And I think (especially older kids) are ready for and engaged by this topic.
Also I love Disneyland but am not not critical of it so I’m super excited for that aspect. Ah!