“I tried to capture the atmosphere of that experience as accurately as I could,” Sobel tells SBS. Opening old family wounds, the accusation is enough to give his extended family the ammunition they need to no longer hide their contempt for the Californian outsiders. Before long, however, Ryder becomes the target of not just whispers behind his back, but also an accusation involving a nine-year-old cousin, Molly (Ursula Parker). Deciding that he doesn’t want to keep his sexuality a secret, his parents suggest that coming out to his extended family isn’t for the best. Inspired in part by his own experience moving away from his Nebraska home – it was even filmed in the very house that Sobel’s mother was raised in – Take Me to the River focuses primarily on Ryder (Logan Miller), a mop-haired teenager who arrives with his mum, Cindy (Robin Weigart) and dad (Richard Schiff), at the reunion for his mother’s side of the family. “All I wanted to do when I was a kid was act, and I gave it up when I became disabled because I thought it wouldn’t be a feasible career path, because I didn’t see disabled actors on screen or on stage who had sustainable careers.” “Though I couldn’t have predicted the extend of recent partisanisation”, Sobel tells me at the start of our interview, “I have felt for some time the widening ideological gap between the California and Nebraska sides of my family.”
Written and directed by first-time filmmaker Matt Sobel, the film sways between frightening and surreal as the appearance of liberal California-based city folks at a family reunion in Nebraska brings out the sinister anger that has been bubbling beneath the surface for decades.įor Sobel, Trump’s electoral victory definitely casts the film in an even more culturally illuminating light. Such is the case with Take Me to the River, a quietly intense film about the confrontation between social classes and seething family resentment. In a post-Trump world, even the films made before the 2016 election now seem to speak directly on issues exacerbated by the American President’s rise, as anger and contempt have been brought out of the shadows and into the mainstream.
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