Ten Thousand Saints

Director: Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini
Screenwriters: Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini

Institute History

  • 2015 Sundance Film Festival

Description

Jude—named after a Beatles song by his hippie parents—spends his high school days in small-town Vermont getting high with his best friend, Teddy. Beneath Jude’s mind-numbing activities lurks a desire to reconnect with his estranged father, Les, who abandoned the family when Jude was nine. Desperate to keep her son out of trouble, Jude’s mother sends him to live with Les in New York City. In the roiling and raw East Village, Jude struggles to establish an identity within the cultural upheaval downtown and forms an unlikely surrogate family with Teddy’s straight-edge brother and a troubled, rich uptown girl.

Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini craft a raw and layered film, pulsating with the urgent angst of young Jude, desperately seeking to define his place in the world. Asa Butterfield and Hailee Steinfeld lead a superb ensemble with refreshing vulnerability, plunging us into the frenetic upheaval of adolescence. —T.B.

— Toby Brooks

Screening Details

Credits

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