If you’re passionate enough about “off the beaten path” movies that you travel out of town to see them, you might have already met Nick Pinkerton this month—or soon will. As screenwriter of The Sweet East, a low-budget indie film that debuted last year at the Cannes Film Festival’s “Directors’ Fortnight” program, he’s doing special screenings with Q&A sessions this month in Cincinnati, Louisville, Lexington, Dayton, Columbus, Akron, and Cleveland as the movie gets released. He comes to the Woodward Theater in Over-the-Rhine at 7:30 p.m. Monday; the film will be shown again on February 19 at the same time.
In The Sweet East, high-school student Lillian (Talia Ryder) is on a class trip to Washington, D.C. from South Carolina when she gets involved in a strange, picaresque journey along the East Coast involving sometimes-humorous, sometimes-frightening, and often-troubling encounters with a range of Americans as eccentrically unusual as anything Alice experienced in Wonderland, but also more weirdly real for our times. The film has some nuanced characters written by Pinkerton and an inventive visual presence courtesy of first-time solo director Sean Price Williams, who also is the film’s co-cinematographer.
There is good acting, especially by 21-year-old Ryder, an up-and-comer who previously played Hortensia in the Broadway musical Matilda and was in the 2020 indie film Never Rarely Sometimes Always. Ayo Edibiri of The Bear fame is here too, and Jacob Elordi appears as a British actor—he played Elvis in the recent Priscilla and was also in Saltburn. Watch the trailer here.
So there are many reasons The Sweet East could be of great interest to an indie film audience. Still, in this internet- and media-saturated age, it’s unusual for a small, alternative-minded movie like this to send its creative talent out on the road to build word-of-mouth support. The relatively new U.S. distributor Utopia has supported these in-person presentations as consistent with the goal stated on its website: “Supporting the Next Wave of Storytellers.”
Still, why such a deep dive at cinematheques and other venues in the Midwest? It probably helps that Pinkerton, 43, is a Cincinnati native who still has close ties here, although he now lives in Brooklyn. Besides being home to his father, who lives in Northside, and his Dayton area-residing brother, this is the place where Pinkerton’s film interest began. He grew up in Wyoming.
“I started being rather interested in watching off-the-beaten-path things when I was 12 or 13,” he says in a recent phone interview from his Brooklyn home. In the 1990s, he discovered the alternative programming at The Real Movies, an indie theater that occupied the space once managed by the fabled The Movies/Moviola at 719 Race Street. “At least two or three times a month I’d take the 78 bus downtown and go see things there.”
Pinkerton also attended the occasional presentations of Cincinnati Film Society and other odd or unusual cinematic opportunities. “I remember seeing Andre De Toth’s House of Wax screening at the Emery Theater, which is in total ruin now,” he says. “It was such a strange one-off thing.” (When I inform him, he’s glad to know the Emery currently is being restored by the Children’s Theatre of Cincinnati.)
It wasn’t the easiest time to see esoteric things in Cincinnati, Pinkerton says. “A lot of those old outlets—repertory cinemas and funkier video stores—were starting to dry up and the internet had not yet become a useful resource. But I did the best I could with what was available to me.”
He obviously learned from what he was able to see. Enrolling in Wright State University’s Motion Picture Production program, he left just short of graduation to try the life of a writer in New York City. “I had been well regarded as a writer in my (college) film classes,” he says. “Even in high school, if there was anything I distinguished myself for, it would have been that.”
After some 20 years in New York, Pinkerton certainly has distinguished himself as a critical writer on moving-image artforms. A list of his writing outlets includes the magazines Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Artforum, Frieze, Reverse Shot, The Guardian, Harper’s, and the Village Voice. He is also editor of Bombast film magazine and editor-at-large of Metrograph, the journal of a New York arthouse cinema and streaming platform.
He also has a Substack platform called Employee Picks and has written a book, Goodbye, Dragon Inn. The book is about the highly regarded 2003 classic film of the same name by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, where a movie theater and its attendees are shown during the theater’s final night of operation.
Pinkerton’s expansion into screenwriting came about through a long-time friendship with Williams, who himself has steadily built a reputation as a cinematographer of such unconventional indie films like the Safdie Brothers’ Heaven Knows What and Good Time and Owen Kline’s Funny Pages. “As somebody who had always tried to direct himself, he approached me and asked if I could write something for him,” says Pinkerton. “Sean is somebody who has a certain standing, so it seemed plausible I would not be writing something to be stuffed away in a drawer somewhere.”
Although The Sweet East was shot in 2021 and 2022, its roots as an idea go back further to the start of a troubled era in the American history that we’re not yet past: the 2016 election of Donald Trump. “I had the idea of a high school class trip to D.C. during the Inauguration and a 17- or 18-year-old separated from the class during this trip,” Pinkerton says, citing the 1969 movie Medium Cool as an inspiration. “There was something about that moment and the general high pitch of strange behavior by Americans of all different stripes that stayed in my mind and became the basis for the movie.”
Pinkerton says he’s pleased with the result. “I think there are certain representative samples of various American specie, but I hope the film is something more sophisticated than wandering through a gallery of types,” he says. “I hope everybody has been sufficiently individuated and painted with some unexpected colors.”
The Sweet East is slated to begin its wider theatrical release on February 9 and then hopefully grow theatrical engagements from there. Pinkerton has attended enough screenings so far to believe it does have the potential to draw young people especially, mainly by virtue of the fact it has a happening young cast. “Certainly I understand that’s doing more to lure them in than Shawn’s name or mine,” he says. “But it’s a pretty unorthodox move in terms of structure, in terms of aesthetics, in terms of not spending a lot of time thinking about character likability. And it’s very cool to me audiences are responding. I hope it’s a movie that respects the intelligence of anybody watching it.”
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