Based on a true story, Leave No Trace is about a homeless PTSD–suffering vet raising his teenage daughter in a secret encampment buried deep in Portland’s Forest Park. When the Georgia Straight gets filmmaker Debra Granik on the phone from Portland, on the eve of a cast-and-crew screening, talk turns to—what else?—the anxieties of modern parenting. Depicted in fine detail in Leave No Trace, such off-the-grid and out-of-sight living looks tough but also weirdly attractive to anyone grappling with their teen offspring’s iPhone addiction. Granik readily agrees that there’s an element of wish fulfillment being played out on-screen.

“It becomes very hard to hear your own thoughts; it becomes very hard to raise children that can hear their own thoughts,” Granik laments, herself the mother of a 13-year-old daughter. “It actually takes a lot to ask certain questions of ourselves right now. Want or need? I really started to wire this into the story, to distill and ask those questions amid this amplified chatter, amid this torrent, this onslaught of phrasing and thinking and imagery being churned out by these very, very, very massive corporations that are called ‘media makers’.”

It turns out that Granik’s lead, Ben Foster, capping an impressive run of recent work that includes Hostiles and Hell or High Water, was pondering these questions himself. As shooting began, he learned that he was about to become a first-time dad. His research, meanwhile, led him to Sam Keith’s One Man’s Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey, the chronicle of a friend’s solo retreat into remote Alaska, first published in 1973. “I’d liken it to the nonflowery writing of Henry David Thoreau,” Granik remarks.

There is, undoubtedly, another kind of grief being expressed here. Gen-Xers like the 55-year-old Granik naturally remember a time when media, social and otherwise, didn’t operate on such an all-consuming bandwidth. (Not to mention a time, between Vietnam and the state of permanent war that ensued in 2001, when America wasn’t producing endless hordes of damaged veterans.) As adapted from Peter Rock’s book My Abandonment, Leave No Trace, opening Friday (July 6), also very deliberately recalls the kind of grown-up cinema that was squeezed out of the multiplexes starting early in the new millennium. It’s a film distinguished by its tone, its quiet, and the same passionate sensitivity that Granik brought to her addiction drama Off the Bone and—mirroring her feel for marginalized character and location—2010’s Ozark-set breakthrough, Winter’s Bone. In other words, this is not Themiscyra or Wakanda.

But, the filmmaker notes: “It becomes a big risk; it becomes inherently uncommercial—people are expecting jolts and a huge score and the roaring of an automatic weapon and the sound of extreme pain when someone gets knifed, you know? The level of bloodlust that a lot of entertainment relies upon makes it very difficult to come down. How do you decelerate to watch a quieter film? It’s something that filmmakers in my camp are really struggling with.” Well, it’s also something that viewers in our camp accept with sincere gratitude.

Published July, 2018