She’s only seven, but exuding a confidence rarely found in someone that age, Brooklynn Prince’s outstanding performance has put her in the running for Best Actress this year

That’s amongst the likes of Meryl Streep, Annette Bening, Judi Dench, Kate Winslet, Nicole Kidman, Jessica Chastain, and Emma Stone.

At least that’s what The Daily Beast‘s Kevin Fallon thinks.

Starring as the lead role in indie director Sean Baker’s new film, The Florida Project, Falon interviews Prince and Baker who described how casting Prince was a little too easy:

Baker had almost given up on his casting search by the time a local casting agency brought Prince to his attention. The first time he noticed her, she was doing squats and forcing Christopher Rivera, another young actor who ended up getting cast as Moonee’s friend, to do push-ups, in order to ramp up their energy for the audition.

“Clearly, she won us over even before the audition,” Baker says. Prince smiles performatively. “Why thank you, Sean.”

The film was a sensation at the Cannes, Toronto and New York film festivals, and takes a deep look at the “hidden homeless” in the USA:

In The Florida Project, Prince plays Moonee, who lives in a seedy Orlando motel room with her single mother, Halley, portrayed in a stunning breakout performance by Bria Vinaite. Moonee and Halley are examples of what Baker calls the hidden homeless, members of the underclass who scrape and scavenge, and sometimes just resign, to live in motels and makeshift homes, often in America’s biggest cities.

In this case, it’s in Orlando, in the bleak shadow of the happiest place on earth.

And for the lead role of Moonee, Baker needed to cast someone special:

We meet Mooney hocking loogies with her friends. At first glance, they seem just like any rabble-rousing, listless kids running amok in the dog days of summer. Moonee’s a riot, with a smart-alecky loud mouth, a penchant for copying her mom’s raunchy dance moves and poses, and feral reign over the parking lots and derelict highway-adjacent motels that surround her.

But we also witness Moonee slowly become sentient to the realities of her living situation, the frustrations over what she’s being deprived of, and intense conflict between her fierce love for her mother and intrinsic suspicion that she deserves more.

Check the trailer:

Oh, did I forget to mention Willem Dafoe is in it? And so paternal and loving, too. Kind of a shock.

[source:dailybeast]