Constellations

One in ten children in the United States lives below the poverty line. Among them is twelve-year-old Mikel, who lives with his parents Jason and Tonya in a one-room apartment in a cheap motel. His story is exceptional in that he was born into extreme poverty and alcohol addiction and knows no other life, even though he longs for one. This empathetic family portrait, free of prejudice and with an unusual understanding of the characters' situation, tells a story of love and pain, hopelessness and hope, and points to a flaw in the system that excludes low-income households from the regular real estate market and creates socially conditioned generational trauma.“It’s a comment on the U.S. as an institution and as a society, where people are ‘collected’ only because they need to exist next to each other, not necessarily with each other.” — Monica StrømdahlSource: International Documentary Association.