The Florida Project: Transformative Storytelling and Childhood Optimism in Film Yasser Owino College

The Florida Project by director Sean Baker is a film that offers one of those transporting experiences that audiences rarely experience in modern films anymore. This film follows a group of kids and their parents who live in a budget motel outside of Disney World in Florida. The people who live in this community are on the economic margins. They are not quite homeless but not quite able to keep a permanent roof over their heads either. The struggles of living in this kind of poverty give the film an undertone of sadness. The genius of the Florida Project is that it tells its story from the perspective of the children who can't help but see their world as a playground. Baker is pulling heavily from Hal Roach's Little Rascals, a classic series of comedy short films from the 20s and 30s that was ground-breaking in the way that it showed kids as kids. Trying to capture the nuances of their behavior and energy in their natural way. Like the Florida Project, Little Rascals was set against economic hardship, the great depression. These kids too were growing up in poverty but the focus was never on that. It was on the scrappy optimism of childhood.

The Florida Project has deeper ambitions than Little Rascals but that optimism, the...