Janet Planet

Summer 1991, somewhere in the woods of western Massachusetts. That's where Annie Baker, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2014 with 'The Flick', set 'Janet Planet', her first film as a director. She wrote it too, A24 produced it, and while it isn't autobiographical, it draws heavily on her own childhood in Amherst with her divorced mother. By her late thirties she'd made peace with never directing a film, and had even said so out loud. Then the chance came along.

Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) is 11, and she rings her mother from summer camp in the middle of the night to say she'll kill herself if nobody comes to get her. Janet (Julianne Nicholson) is an acupuncturist who sees patients at home, and her practice is what gives the film its title. She goes to collect her, and Lacy comes home hoping to have her all to herself for the rest of the holidays. That won't be easy. Plenty of other people orbit Janet, and the story gives each of them a chapter.

First there's Wayne (Will Patton), Janet's boyfriend, a taciturn Vietnam veteran who suffers from migraines and whom Lacy can't stand. Then comes Regina (Sophie Okonedo), an old friend who walks out on the commune of a local theatre troupe and moves in with them, and later Avi (Elias Koteas), the troupe's charismatic leader. Lacy watches all of it from her corner, among her dolls and figurines, and slowly begins to see her mother as an ordinary person.

Ziegler had never been in a film before. Baker refused to film anywhere but western Massachusetts, and she shot on 16mm, with Maria von Hausswolff of 'Godland' behind the camera. There's no score. What you hear is the place itself, captured by Baker and her sound designer, Paul Hsu, with a microphone left running for two weeks straight. Among her influences she names Maurice Pialat and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

It premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in September 2023, went on to the New York Film Festival and the Berlinale's Panorama section, and reached US cinemas in June 2024, with British audiences getting it in July. Critics were mostly won over by Baker's direction and by Ziegler, and a few compared it with Kelly Reichardt's work, though others found it slow. The New York Film Critics Circle named it best first film, and it picked up three Independent Spirit nominations.

• Drama