JANET PLANET / Feature Film / Telluride + NYFF 2023

Director: Annie Baker

Producers: Dan Janvey, Derrick Tseng, Andrew Goldman

Casting Director: Jessica Kelly

Additional Casting Directors: Abby Harri, Eléonore Hendricks

Child Acting Coach: Abby Harri

Emily (Camp Counselor): Abby Harri

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It’s the summer before Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) starts sixth grade, and she is spending the lazy months with her acupuncturist mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), in their home in the woods. As the months drift by, the bespectacled, taciturn girl, fiercely observant, watches Janet and three enigmatic adults who drift in and out of their lives, whether romantic interests or reconnected friends. Set in 1991 rural Western Massachusetts, the superb debut film from Pulitzer Prize­–winning playwright Annie Baker is a work of surreal tranquility that moves at a different, lost pace of life, and which perceives heartbreak just as Lacy is beginning to grasp the world and her place in it. Baker has created a film about a mother and daughter quite unlike any other, heightening the viewer’s senses and expressing oceans of feeling with the smallest gestures. Nicholson and Ziegler perform their roles with an inspiring lack of sentimentality, and the wondrous supporting cast includes Elias Koteas, Sophie Okonedo, and Will Patton. An A24 release.  — New York Film Festival

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CRITICAL PRAISE for JANET PLANET

"Baker has described the film as a story 'about falling out of love with your mother,' which is what Ziegler conveys with a subtlety and emotional acuity that’s astonishing in such a young and inexperienced actor." — David Roony, The Hollywood Reporter

 

"'Janet Planet' is gloriously packed with the carefully observed details of the lives of its central characters, who are embodied with warmth and endearing strangeness by Ziegler, an incredible discovery, and the typically fantastic Nicholson, who gives one of her finest performances to date."  — Esther Zuckerman, Indiewire

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