Adapted from his earlier successful short of the same name, Destin Daniel Cretton’s feature Short Term 12 tells the story of a 20-something supervising staff member of a foster care facility and the troubled relationships which fill her life. We caught up with Destin at the London Film Festival to try and discover the formulae for his filmmaking emotional math equations and sign up for his first date questions service.

Short Term 12 (2013)

Short Term 12 is told through the eyes of Grace, a twenty-something supervisor at a foster-care facility for at-risk teenagers. Passionate and tough, Grace is a formidable caretaker of the kids in her charge – and in love with her long-term boyfriend and co-worker, Mason.

But Grace’s own difficult past – and the surprising future that suddenly presents itself – throw her into unforeseen confusion, made all the sharper with the arrival of a new intake at the facility: a gifted but troubled teenage girl with whom Grace has a charged connection.

I didn’t make the short as a calling card or as a way to turn it into a feature.

3 Responses to DN LFF2013: Short Term 12 – Destin Daniel Cretton

  1. George Johnson says:

    This movie stank.
    It failed on all levels in telling a worthwhile story.
    The characters were vapid, shallow, cliche, boring, blank voids of nothing.

    The main “Void filled with nothing” character the camera irritatingly focuses upon, squanders over 65 minutes of the movie by speaking very sparse dialog with the dull kids. It goes nowhere, does nothing.
    You can destroy 60 minutes of the 90-minute movie and zero amount of the plot will be lost. It is that vapid, shallow, and dull.

  2. MarBelle says:

    Sorry to hear the film didn’t connect with you.

    I thought Destin did a great job of building believable relationships and also showing how Grace’s person damage pushed her to go that extra mile for the kids in her care.

  3. Casey Kearns says:

    This is an absolutely wonderful film! I watched intently all the way through and cannot say enough about the excellent way each character’s story is told–not overbearing but nuanced. The stories told aren’t full of giveaway predictability and keep you empathizing and guessing about the outcome. Little things like the dolls, the rap song, the shark story… leave you knowing and able to understand the pain…beautiful.

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