With a camera that tarries Proust-like through the time and space of the everyday
--the plastic decor of American hospitality, quiet parking lots of hasty blow-jobs,
and the backwater bars of the rural South--the luscious tenor of Ira Sachs' first feature film
stands in juxtaposition to the quietly violent tale he narrates of a staccato exchange across race,
class, and culture. If the delta, the unpeopled space of a Mississippi shore,
offers the hope for the suburban, white Lincoln(Shayne Gray) and Afro-Amerasian John/Minh (Thang Chan)
to bridge the social categories that distinguish them,
*The Delta* points instead to Lincoln's inability to occupy that other space,
to the impulse that drives him back to the sad comforts of home and that pushes John to play out
only another of the few scripted roles the society allows him.

Sachs first snares us with the film's darling, a delectable young Lincoln,
whose faux naivet* and uncomfortable relation to his own sexuality wane as his unspoken complicity
with the racism of a 'multicultural' South gets writ large.
Like this transposition, the lingering beauty of Sachs' camera reveals itself, like cold glass,
to be a brilliant instrument for freezing and rigidifying the mobility of desire.

Starting the program on a lighter foot is Andrew Porter's humorous commentary on youthful
desire and its domestic constraints, *Nobody I Know*. In this wry Australian short,
faces tell a story far richer than the brief dialogue as a frustrated teenager tries to turn a trick.