Institute History
Description
After gathering tremendous attention at the Venice, Toronto, and Telluride film festivals, highly acclaimed filmmaker Ramin Bahrani returns to the Sundance Film Festival for the first time since his debut feature, Man Push Cart, with this utterly enthralling drama.
Set amidst the backdrop of the 2008 housing market catastrophe, Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield), a hard-working and honest man, can’t save his family home despite his best efforts. Thrown to the streets with alarming precision by real estate shark Mike Carver (Michael Shannon), Dennis, out of work and luck, is given a unique opportunity—to join Carver’s crew and put others through the harrowing ordeal done to him in order to earn back what’s his. Delicately training his eye on the rigorous details, the reliably astute Ramin Bahrani imbues his characters with icy complexity to achieve his compassionate portrait of a man whose integrity has become ensnared within an all-too-relevant American crisis. With precision and care, Bahrani’s provocative character study applies all the cinematic tools at his disposal to explore the ethical dilemma at the heart of man’s struggle to reach higher—by whatever means necessary. —L.Z.