Sunshine State

Director: John Sayles

2002 / 141min / 35mm

Formerly segregated Plantation Island in northern Florida—played by Amelia Island, outside of Jacksonville—is being targeted by developers intent on turning it into a bland leisure destination in Sayles’s elegiac ensemble drama, its cast led by Angela Bassett and Edie Falco, both playing women with deep roots on the island and unresolved issues with their surviving parents, but making room for some 50 other speaking roles, including a group of golfers playing the role of commenting Greek chorus. “Creates a cinematic mosaic of American lives unprecedented in its range, balance, subtlety and even-handedness… In telling overlapping stories, it is Sayles’s first film to convey the sweep of a top-drawer Robert Altman movie.” —The New York Times

Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics