Sean Baker‘s slice-of-life film The Florida Project might be colourful, but it soon reveals the bleak realities of poverty-stricken families that live in motels near Walt Disney World, Florida. The film follows Moonee, a six-year-old girl who lives with her mother in the Magic Castle motel in Kissimmee.
Moonee’s mother, Halley, tries to make ends meet by selling perfume to tourists in car parks after getting fired from her job as an exotic dancer for refusing to have sex with clients. Eventually, Halley resorts to sex work in order to provide for herself and Moonee, often while her daughter is bathing in the next room.
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Baker’s film captures genuine moments of childhood innocence whilst also demonstrating how poverty and unstable living conditions affect the lives of young kids and adults alike. For example, in one scene, after Moonee sees an adult engaging in an argument, she tells her friend that she always knows when an adult is about to cry. Although The Florida Project is beautiful, it is also extremely tragic, highlighting the number of families forced to live close to wealth and affluence yet will never be able to reach it.
Speaking about the film, Baker said: “If more stories are told about marginalized communities, subcultures and minorities, the less marginalized they will be.” He was shocked to discover just how many families live like Halley and Moonee, “living hand-to-mouth in cheap motels.”
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Elsewhere, co-writer Chris Bergoch was inspired by Our Gang films, saying: “[the characters] were actually living in poverty, but the focus was the joy of childhood, the humour that comes from watching and hearing children”. Here, we look at the locations that helped realise a modern classic.
The real-life filming locations of The Florida Project:
The motels
The Florida Project was filmed in the real Magic Castle Inn and Suites, which is located six miles away from Walt Disney World on US Highway 192 in Kissimmee. To be precise, our protagonists live in Room 323. Filming took place over the summer of 2016, employing largely non-actors, including Brooklynn Prince as Moonee and Bria Vinaite as Halley.
The cast was also joined by Willem Dafoe, who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role. The real-life motel can be visited by the public; however, it is nowhere near as run-down as the film portrays it to be. Another motel in the film is the Futureland Inn, where Moonee’s friend Jancey lives. Since filming, there has been an ownership change, meaning the distinctive rockets have been removed – it is now the Paradise Inn.
The shops
Within the film, the children also visit locations that look straight out of a cartoon, but they all exist nearby the motel. The children can be seen walking past a gift shop which is adorned with a giant wizard head – this is the Jungle Falls Gift Shop, just a three-minute walk from the Magic Castle Inn. Down the same strip is Eli’s Orange World, a massive orange dome-shaped building that sells souvenirs and citrus products. The founder of the shop describes it as the “world’s largest orange”.
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Moonee and her friends also run past the Mermaid Gift Shop, which is about ten minutes in the car from the motel and features a giant mermaid that lays across the front of the building. Other stores featured include the Disney Gifts Outlet and, of course, the ice-cream-shaped Twistee Treat, where the children hassle customers for money.
Walt Disney World, Florida
The Florida Project reaches its climax when the DCF show up to take Moonee into foster care. She manages to escape to the Futureland Inn, where she sobs to Jancey before her friend grabs her hand and the pair run all the way to Disney World. It’s an extremely moving scene; however, the crew had to improvise in order to film at the world-famous resort. Baker shared, “It’s not against the law [to film there], it’s just against the rules, and sometimes you have to break rules to make a film.”
Armed with an iPhone 6s and the bare minimum crew, the ending scene that depicts Moonee and Jancey running toward the Magic Kingdom was shot. This isn’t the first time Baker has used a phone to shoot a film – his 2015 film Tangerine was shot entirely on three iPhone 5S cameras.
Discussing the ambiguous ending, Baker said: “[Moonee] can’t go to Disney’s Animal Kingdom, so she goes to the ‘safari’ behind the motel and looks at cows; she goes to the abandoned condos because she can’t go to the Haunted Mansion. And in the end, with this inevitable drama, this is me saying to the audience, if you want a happy ending, you’re gonna have to go to that headspace of a kid because, here, that’s the only way to achieve it.”
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