You Can Count on Me
After their parents die young, a single mother and her drifting brother reunite in their small hometown and test how much they can still rely on each other.
Sundance Film Festival, Grand Jury Prize and Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, 2000
A settled single mother in a small town welcomes back her restless younger brother, who arrives asking for money and drifting between jobs. Both orphaned as children, they love each other deeply but keep colliding over her need for order and his need to move on, while her young son quietly watches the two adults fail and try again.
The film sits with the long reach of early loss: two siblings still organised around a grief that was never worked through, caught between clinging attachment and the urge to flee. Scenes with the sister's own counsellor make the therapeutic frame explicit, and the picture treats dependence and separation as an unfinished, lifelong negotiation. It won the Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival.
Details
- 2000
- United States
- English
- Film