Matt Ross · 2016 · road

Matt Ross's 2016 film. A father raising six children off the grid in the Washington forest packs them into a bus called Steve and drives to New Mexico to disrupt their mother's funeral - and the further from home they get, the harder it is to say he was right.

1. 1
   The forest

   Somewhere in the Washington Cascades: a teepee, six children, Noam Chomsky Day instead of Christmas, and an education in rock climbing, Esperanto and the Bill of Rights. Then their mother dies in a hospital far away.

2. 2
   Gold Bar

   The first contact with America, and it is a supermarket - Ben faking a heart attack in the aisle while six children clear the shelves, which they have rehearsed and call Operation Free the Food.

3. 3
   Moses Lake

   East over the mountains to a trailer park, where Bo meets a girl at a campfire, kisses her, proposes within the hour, and discovers that everything his father taught him left this out entirely.

4. 4
   Albuquerque

   New Mexico, and a church funeral being held for a woman who wanted to be cremated - Ben standing up in the middle of it to read his wife's will aloud to the congregation.

5. 5
   Las Cruces

   Jack's house, and the argument that has been coming the whole film: a grandfather who thinks the children are being ruined, and a father who is no longer sure he can prove otherwise.

6. 6
   The Pacific Northwest

   Home, and the pyre on the coast - her body taken back, burned as she asked, and the ashes flushed down an airport lavatory, exactly as she wrote it. Then a farmhouse, and a school bus that stops for them.