THE SWEET EAST is a picaresque journey through the cities and woods of the Eastern seaboard of the United States undertaken by Lillian, a high school senior from South Carolina who gets her first glimpse of the wider world on a class trip to Washington, D.C. Separated from her schoolmates, she embarks on a fractured fairy tale travelogue into America, where she is granted access to a variety of the strange factions that proliferate the present-day unreality of contemporary life. Ensemble cast lead by Talia Ryder along with Simon Rex, Jacob Elordi, Ayo Edibiri and more.
“A shape-shifting satire about modern American subcultures… Mileage is sure to vary on the film’s picaresque antics. Lillian falls in with what Williams and the screenwriter Nick Pinkerton see as the most mockable crews: brain-fried anarchists in Washington, D.C.; a sexually repressed Muslim brotherhood in rural Vermont; navel-gazing filmmakers (Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy O. Harris) in the Big Apple.” —Beatrice Loayza, New York Times “...Attempts to illustrate and skewer the melting pot of viewpoints and cultures which form the East Coast’s reality, and which bounce off our passive, rubbery protagonist as she moves up the Atlantic seaboard — all merely fodder for her to exploit to form new connections in her escape from the South.” —Brianna Ziegler, Paste Magazine “Intriguingly anthropological in its take on America as a subject, viewed less through the prism of what American might signify as a nation, than how America might feel as an experience — there’s a sense of disintegration and incipient violence seeping through everything, which occasionally explodes to entertaining effect, but there’s clearly deep affection there too.” —Catherine Bray, Variety
