One of the most quietly devastating films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival is also one of the festival’s sleeper hits. Director Cole Webley’s feature debut, Omaha, is a sensitive and heart wrenching family drama that unfolds on an eastbound road trip at the height of the 2008 economic crisis.
John Magaro (September 5) stars as a newly widowed father who wakes his young children early one morning when they are forced to vacate their home. It is unclear how recently his wife passed away, though some clues — unfinished laundry, vases of dying flowers — suggest the loss is still very fresh. Hurrying to rush the kids out the door, he asks his 9-year-old daughter what she would bring if there was a fire and she had no time to decide. A photo of her mother, a Nintendo DS, and a stack of books are her most important possessions and the only things she can carry with her as they depart.
Molly Belle Wright (The Best Christmas Pageant Ever) is 9-year-old Ella, a typical first born daughter who, as the default lady of the house, shoulders the burden of emotional care for her father and 6-year-old brother Charlie (Wyatt Solis). Loaded into a barely running Honda with their golden retriever Rex, they depart under the sympathetic but duty bound eye of the local sheriff, leaving their home somewhere in the southwest. Dad offers only that they are going to Nebraska, but provides no explanation or plans about what awaits them there…