Sean

I'm sure it does not need to be said, but I am not an American teenager – never have been; so my ability to relate or even care about their experiences or feelings is really limited. Kudos to this steady and almost poetic short film which drifts across the life of Sean, but does it in a way that it feels like it is not just about some kid but perhaps links to a wider experience and feeling. The actual subject of the film is a kid called Sean who enjoys skateboarding and has dreams of perhaps making that the "thing" he does, however for the meantime he is getting up at 0330 each day to head to work at a fast-food restaurant. In his free time there is little to occupy him and his city feels very small, with both an attachment to him as his home, but yet being a place he longs to get away from.

I am not sure if the makers of this film genuinely did plan to make a whole film about Sean as an individual, but the actual end result is a lot better than that may have been. The goal here seems to be to give the viewer an experience of this adolescence's life at the moment, and fill in around his words with shots from his city, showing what it is like as a place and what people get up to. In doing so it has a poetic glide of images from bowling alleys, empty landscapes, a old swing under a graffiti-strewed bridge, a sort of spring-break event of tasteless excess, and other such images. All the time we hear from Sean about the rather dead-end feeling of no opportunities, few activities, and some of the memorable events that stand out – mostly slightly tawdry and low-key. This comes together really well to produce a sense of a place and also of a generation; as I said, I have never been an American teenager, but I got a good understanding of Sean's situation from this film, which tells me it worked.

The downside of the approach is that the film is using a very broad brush to paint this picture, and it doesn't really go out of its way to flatter; the images of a bowling alley is so small middle-America that it hurts, the teenagers blowing off steam with sexual and drunken activity, the spread-out suburban housing, all of these things speak to the tedium of reality, the smallness of it all, and suggests that to stay is only to accept your place and accept your lot. In a way it is a bit patronizing to say out loud, and probably also quite unfair because all "someone has to live there" places are like this all round the world, not everyone can live in a big bright exciting city. The thing that sort of makes me okay to give this aspect a pass, is that the director comes from this place him (Lake Havasu City), so I guess there is a lot of his own experience and feeling in the film too – particularly the pictures.

So, for its weaknesses, it does work very well. I found it still and engaging, painting a picture of a life in this place, and filling it out to give a sense of experiences that must be common across others in the same boat in different but similar places.