"A widely televised violence, the images of 9/11 are among the most shocking and enduring images the world has ever seen, sadly to the point of heightening America's messianic complex and the anti-Muslim rhetoric across the globe - and perhaps what made most Americans, and white people at large, so inured to livestreamed genocides. In this way, "I'll Be Gone in June" converses with the current terror even as the film is set in the past, capturing what it's like to witness a violence of this scale play out in real-time, especially for not-so-clueless young people at the turn of the millennium."
"Shot for over 50 days, the result is a poetically probing movie that features the teenager protagonist Franny (Naomi Cosma, in a breakout leading role) as the German-Russian filmmaker's self-insert in an effort to belatedly wrestle with some of her own history as an exchange student from Germany in 2001 chasing the American Dream by first settling in the sleepy town of Las Cruces, New Mexico before setting out for either New York or California to embrace all the incredible things it has to offer."
"Except none of the latter would pan out as Franny (and the director's teenage self) aspired to. With a botched future ahead of her, Frann"
A film set around September 2001 follows Franny, a German-Russian teenager, as she arrives in Las Cruces, New Mexico as an exchange student. She hopes to reach New York or California to pursue the American Dream, but her plans do not work out. The story places her stifling solitude alongside the widely televised violence of 9/11 and its aftermath, including the U.S. war on terror. The film portrays what it feels like to witness large-scale violence unfold in real time, especially for young people who are not sheltered from the events. It uses a poetic, probing approach and draws on the director’s own teenage history.
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