Sundance Review: Jamie Dack’s ‘Palm Trees And Power Lines’
Writer-director Jamie Dack has expanded her widely admired 2018 short film Palm Trees and Power Lines into a considerably more thorny and disturbing feature of the same title. Shot verité style on the most banal possible locations, the film, which is making its world premiere in the U.S. Dramatic Competition section of the Sundance Film Festival, takes an unvarnished look at an environment that is arid both literally and figuratively, one in which young people seem to be given precious little guidance or structure by family or society. Dack doesn’t explicitly editorialize but makes acutely clear the vulnerability of adolescents left too much to their own devices at a formative age.