With a beautiful singing voice and named after Billie Holiday who she daydreams about, teenager Billie and her younger brother Nico spend their days scrounging up scrap metal in New Bedford, Massachusetts. For Billie and Nico, life with their father is a roller-coaster ride of playfulness and unease. When he is in the grip of alcohol, tears flow and their apparently idyllic family life collapses. Their mostly absent and irresponsible mother is not much help either. But their friendship with Malik, a boy of Billie’s age, frees them from their shackles. Together they embark on a journey full of intense moments of freedom.
“It’s a testament to childhood resilience. There’s a real beauty to the characters’ childhood, because it’s also tragedy right underneath it. Children can be in horrific situations, but there’s this magic that kids often find. It’s part of their natural survival. The film goes there and lives there for a while. Not that there’s a message, but the film taps into a piece of us, all of us.” (Karyn Parsons)
Alexandre Rockwell
Born (Boston, Massachusetts, 1956) into an artistic family, Rockwell’s grandfather was the Russian animator Alexandre Alexeieff, his father an actor and filmmaker, and his mother a painter. In the Soup established his reputation as one of the most interesting filmmakers on America’s independent film scene. Currently based in Los Angeles, he was appointed head of directing at the graduate film department of the NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 2017.