Ballast

In a small township in the Mississippi Delta, a woman raising a child alone and her adolescent son are trying to stay upright in hard conditions. An act of violence nearby pushes them into the life of a man who runs a store by the highway and is frozen inside his own loss. There is a grievance between them that has gone unspoken for years, and it comes back to the surface with this event. Lance Hammer's first film was made with non-professional actors, after a long period living in the region, and with his own money. There is little dialogue, no score, and the camera is handheld; Lol Crawley's 35mm images carry the colour and the emptiness of winter. It won both the directing and the cinematography awards at Sundance in 2008. The telling never sets out to explain anybody, it simply stays beside them.