Weapons

Director: Adam Bhala Lough
Screenwriters: Adam Bhala Lough

Institute History

  • 2007 Sundance Film Festival

Description

Reggie (Nick Cannon) is a young, responsible African American man about to have his first job interview when he spies a shiner on his little sister's face and becomes obsessed with finding a gun to exact revenge. Sean (Mark Webber) comes home from his first year in college to find that his old friends Chris (Paul Dano) and Jason (Riley Smith) are still playing basketball, getting into fights, getting high, and trying to hook up with high school girls. One day, Sean notices that Chris has started to travel around town with a shotgun packed in the back of his truck.

Violent youth culture gets an explosive, provocative update with Adam Bhala Lough's raw and stylized Weapons. Authentically depicting the myopic rhythms of American blue-collar suburban youth, Bhala Lough skillfully unravels the motivations of a group of teenagers who become enmeshed in a series of brutal, seemingly random, youth killings over the course of an intoxicated weekend. A haunted hip-hop soundtrack drenches this insightful study of teenage character and value systems in a world where everyone seems to have a gun, but the most dangerous weapon is the one unleashed by tender things broken inside innocent hearts.

— Shari Frilot

Screening Details

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