“Sunfish (& Other Stories from Green Lake)” Captures Dreamy, Lakeside Slices of Life
It’s easy to feel as though the world revolves around us. We’re stuck in our own brains all day every day, and sometimes we forget that every single person we interact with is living at the center of their own life. We know everyone has their own goals, dreams, and hopes, but we aren’t always confronted with this reality. In Sierra Falconer’s debut feature film, Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake), she lays out an anthological patchwork quilt of the many lives that are unfolding around Green Lake.
courtesy of Sunfish
Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake) is split into four chapters: Sunfish, Summer Camp, Two Hearted, and Resident Bird. In the Sunfish chapter, a young girl (Maren Heary) is dropped off at her grandparents’ (Adam LeFevre & Marceline Hugot) lakehouse. Initially, she’s bored and uninterested, but the discovery of a small sailboat (known as a Sunfish), changes the course of her summer. In Summer Camp, a young boy (Jim Kaplan) attends a prestigious orchestra camp and struggles to live up to his mother’s expectations. Two Hearted is about an unexpected friendship that springs up between a bartender (Karsen Liotta) and a patron (Dominic Bogart) who wants to catch a massive fish in the lake. Lastly, in Resident Bird, two sisters (Tenley Kellogg & Emily Hall) who manage a rental home prepare for the end of summer.
With a runtime of a little under ninety minutes, Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake) is like a warm summer breeze that doesn’t disturb the world, but makes its presence known. Each of the chapters lasts about twenty minutes, which provides a nice pace for the film. These are self-contained stories that invite the imagination to consider what comes after. When the summer ends, where will these people go? What comes next in the lives of these people scattered around the lake? While we never see the characters interacting with each other, Sunfish won’t let the audience forget that they’re all united by this gleaming body of water. In each of the chapters, the lake plays a different role. For some, it’s freedom, for others, it’s what stands in their way.
“The lake is yours, dear,” says the grandfather of the young girl in the first chapter. He has nurtured her curiosity about the personal-sized sailboat that caught her eye. He teaches her to tie knots and how to self-sufficiently pilot her way around Lake Green. There’s a gentleness to these stories, a respect for all the lives that are unfolding without any knowledge of one another. The intimacy with which Falconer tells these stories almost allows the viewer to smell the sunscreen themselves, and the varied tones she balances between each chapter show her ability as a screenwriter. Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake) is a love letter to a place and a season, and how they affect us all in different, beautiful ways.
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