Ballast

A multiple prize-winner at the Sundance Film Festival, this first feature by filmmaker Lance Hammer is a pitchperfect human drama about a shattered family on the rural Mississippi Delta: a middleaged man immobilized by grief for his dead brother, a single mother struggling to survive and her unsupervised young son, who is starting to get in over his head with the wrong crowd. Using a non-professional cast, director Hammer creates a thoroughly naturalistic world of stark winter skies and unspoken emotions, focusing on life's little, yet significant, moments. Writer/Producer/Director: Lance Hammer. (US 2008) 96 min.