Short Term 12

Short Term 12 (2013) takes place at a state run short term care facility. The residents are under eighteen; some were removed from their families and some came to protect themselves. Grace is one of the supervisors and tells nobody about her own past. Destin Daniel Cretton wrote it out of his own job. He had spent two years working at a facility for teenagers. It began as a twenty two minute short. Cretton made it as his master's thesis at San Diego State University; it screened at Sundance in 2009 and won the Jury Prize for short filmmaking. The feature screenplay received one of the Academy's five Nicholl Fellowships in 2010. One significant change happened in the adaptation. The protagonist of the short was a man called Denim, based directly on Cretton himself. In the feature the character became Grace, a woman supervisor. Brie Larson and John Gallagher Jr. were cast through auditions over Skype. Gallagher called it probably the best script he had ever been sent. Both prepared by shadowing staff at similar facilities. Most of the young cast came through open calls with almost no experience. Lakeith Stanfield, who had been in the short, returned to his role; he had stepped away from acting and Cretton could only reach him by email. It was shot in Los Angeles over twenty days in September 2012. It premiered at SXSW in March 2013 and won both the Grand Jury and Audience Awards. It received no Oscar nominations at all, which was much discussed in the industry that year. It runs 96 minutes. Good for: quiet drama, films about young people and trauma, and Brie Larson. Less good for: abuse and self harm are direct subjects. Grace's own history opens late and until then she is held at a distance. The film offers no solution.