We all know the United States of the fringes, the second-class citizens, the “white trash”… Rob Rice sets up his camera here, attentive to this small community gathered round one family. The family gets by as best it can, in a shack surrounded by all kinds of junk, stuck between a road and the desert, the railway track nearby, outside Los Angeles in a place with no redeeming features. We’re immersed through fiction, with Rice taking it upon himself to give the initial couple an invented daughter and to make this the starting and the pivotal point of the tale. The story follows in the footsteps of direct cinema with its moving camera and sketches as though caught on the fly. In this well-known setting of poor, white America, with games of pool and broken down cars and dismantled caravans as décor, the drama weaves a generous tale before our eyes, giving substance to this society of the invisible so often represented in clichés. Far from being judgmental or sensational, Rob Rice takes care of each of his characters. Assisted by this little troupe, a community united by the film, Rice portrays destinies caught in the ordinariness of life and its pitfalls. Illness – the father’s very real disease – is a tragedy that haunts the movie and takes it to an unexpected conclusion. Between epic drama and the construction of visibility, this début is borne aloft by the sumptuous, melancholy beauty of its twilight images.(Nicolas Feodoroff) Robert Rice