The Match Factory Picks Up ‘The Sweet East,’ Premiering in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor The Match Factory has boarded Sean Price Williams’s “The Sweet East,” which has its world premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival in May. It is the first feature film directed by Price Williams, the cinematographer of Owen Kline’s “Funny Pages” (2022), Abel Ferrara’s “Zeros and Ones” (2021), Michael Almereyda’s “Tesla” (2020), Alex Ross Perry’s “Her Smell” (2018) and the Safdies’ “Good Time” (2017). The screenplay is by film critic and programmer Nick Pinkerton. “The Sweet East” is a picaresque journey through the cities and woods of the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. undertaken by Lillian, a high school senior from South Carolina, who gets her first glimpse of the wider world on a class trip to Washington, D.C.

“Separated from her schoolmates, she embarks on a fractured fairy-tale travelogue into America, where she is granted access to a variety of the strange factions that proliferate the present-day unreality of contemporary life,” according to The Match Factory. In the words of Price Williams, the film is a “flare shot across the sky of America.” “ ‘The Sweet East’ is nothing quite like we have seen lately. Sean Price Williams’s unmatched style is written all over his unique debut film – we can’t wait to share this with the world,” The Match Factory’s head of acquisitions and sales Thania Dimitrakopoulou said. The film stars Talia Ryder (“Do Revenge,” “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”), Simon Rex (“Red Rocket”), Earl Cave (“The School of Good and Evil”), Jacob Elordi (“Euphoria,” “Deep Water”), Jeremy O. Harris (“Emily in Paris”), Ayo Edebiri (“The Bear”) and Rish Shah (“Do Revenge”). It is produced by Marathon Films (U.S.) and Base 12