Leave No Trace

Will, a military veteran living with PTSD, and his teenage daughter Tom survive off the grid in a public forest, avoiding all contact with the outside world. When they are discovered and placed in housing, the pressure of ordinary life forces a quiet reckoning between his need to withdraw and her growing wish to belong among other people.

The film sits precisely on the seam between a father's trauma driven avoidance and his daughter's need to individuate and separate. It shows how a parent's survival strategy can become a cage for a child, and how love and letting go can pull in opposite directions. It was a selection of the Sundance Film Festival in 2018, and is based on the novel My Abandonment by Peter Rock.