Crowds packed into the Plaza Theatre on Jan. 23 for a screening of 2023 American film “The Sweet East” followed by a public Q&A with Director Sean Price Williams and Screenwriter Nick Pinkerton.
The event was hosted by the Plaza in partnership with Videodrome and Atlanta-based production company Wax&Wane. Plaza employee Brent Michael moderated the hour-long Q&A, where audience members asked the creative team about the thought process behind the indie film.
Josh Pickney, a Plaza staff member and organizer of the screening, said the night’s pieces “fell into place” after he met somebody with a connection to the duo. He had long been “tapped into New York” and was a fan of Williams and Pinkerton.
“It just seemed like at that point everybody that was interviewing them, doing the tour at Cannes, the New York Film Festival, everything felt so kind of corporate,” Pickney said. “Like, let’s just kind of see if they’d be down to just do something more chill and laid back.”
Pickney said Atlanta has a film scene, but it needs a space to meet. He hopes the Plaza and Videodrome can be the common ground for creatives in the city to create a sort of “Atlanta new wave.”
“It just needs to be facilitated, and we’re not necessarily on the map,” Pickney said. “But doing things like this can help us get there.”
“The Sweet East” released in December 2023 stars Talia Ryder and a gaggle of stars including Jacob Elordi, Ayo Edebiri, Simon Rex and Jeremy O. Harris. It follows high school senior Lillian, who gets separated from her group on a class field trip to Washington, D.C. What follows is a road trip across pockets of American politics and culture on the Eastern seaboard as Lilliana falls in with crust punks, auteurs, white supremacists and more — each one trying to control her in some way.
It’s the solo directorial debut for Sean Price Williams, known for his work as a cinematographer and director of photography on films like “Good Time,” “Her Smell” and “Listen Up Philip.” Pinkerton, a long-time film critic and journalist, penned the script while working with Williams.
The film explores a fractured country with humor and abandon as the main character is thrust into increasingly absurd situations rooted in American anxieties: a Pizzagate scenario, a white supremacist rally, a film-set massacre and, bizarrely, a club night with a gargantuan puppet.
Throughout it all Lillan is a temptation to everyone she meets, what Pinkerton calls a “skeleton key to open up a lot of different sorts of subcultures.” The screenwriter said her taciturnity across every scenario is a key part of the film.
“This has a lot to do with Talia’s performance and maybe not as much as I’d like to take credit for writing where she doesn’t indicate a great deal about how really anything affects her,” Pinkerton said.
During the Q&A, an audience member asked how the duo approached making a film about a young woman as middle-aged men. Pinkerton said he took an approach based in most literary fiction — looking outside oneself, even if he “maybe won’t get anything right.”
What comes through is a female lead imbued with what Pinkerton called a “mid-century masculine” attitude. Liliana doesn’t give a lot of indicators of her feelings during “The Sweet East,” with one character saying late in the film that “everything is a joke” to her.
She leaves the brevity behind in some moments, like after an extended massacre sequence halfway through the runtime. Pinkerton said he only wrote two lines of dialogue for the whole scene. The rest came down to Williams’ direction. The result is a bloody sequence that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
The violence across the film is sensational, but Lillian’s reaction rarely matches the magnitude of what she sees. Instead, she just passes through it all. Pinkerton said he based part of the film on his thoughts about young people in the current economic and political landscape, particularly from 2016 on.
“There’s no hope at all; the few identity kits that are available to you are so completely unfulfilling, and I was just wanting to kind of explore that a little bit,” Pinkerton said. “And feeling a great sense of concern for and solidarity with a youth that I was worried about.”
“The Sweet East” will be playing at the Plaza Theatre through Jan. 25. Tickets and future events at the Plaza Theatre can be found on the Plaza’s website.
