Photo: Lance Hammer's Ballast
Lance Hammer's Ballast suggests and suffers from the influence of the Dardenne brothers. Set somewhere in the vast Mississippi Delta, the film hangs from the backs of a single mother, her troubled son, and the uncle who lives next door, though it takes a while to piece together how everyone is related, how close they live to one another, and what exactly accounts for the depth of their sorrows. The film occurs in jolts of intense atmosphere and emotion, and it is such that one moment the characters are at each others' throats, the next they're playing nice, and the process by which they transition between the two is left entirely to our imaginations. Hammer accomplishes this fractured effect through an almost absurd use of ellipsis, conveying an impressively harried mood but wildly pushing context out of the frame. Ed Gonzalez
Lance Hammer's Ballast suggests and suffers from the influence of the Dardenne brothers. Set somewhere in the vast Mississippi Delta, the film hangs from the backs of a single mother, her troubled son, and the uncle who lives next door, though it takes a while to piece together how everyone is related, how close they live to one another, and what exactly accounts for the depth of their sorrows. The film occurs in jolts of intense atmosphere and emotion, and it is such that one moment the characters are at each others' throats, the next they're playing nice, and the process by which they transition between the two is left entirely to our imaginations. Hammer accomplishes this fractured effect through an almost absurd use of ellipsis, conveying an impressively harried mood but wildly pushing context out of the frame. Ed Gonzalez
