In 2006 and 2007 the film was screened at
Dennis Hopper's
CineVegas Film Festival and was selected as one of only 2 non-studio American independent films to screen at the 60th anniversary of the
Locarno International Film Festival where it was called "the discovery of the festival" by ARTE Television. Screenings were held at the
Helsinki International Film Festival, the
Viennale, the
Ljubljana International Film Festival, the
Gijón International Film Festival, and the Starz Denver International Film Festival. The film was nominated for an IFP
Gotham Award for "Best Film Not Playing in a Theater Near You" and won the One+One Music Award for use of music in a feature film at
Janine Bazin's EntreVues Film Festival. It was referred to in
Variety as: "A starkly radical film debut of uncommon power and artistic principle, Chris Fuller's
Loren Cass announces a genuinely original film-making talent who literally pulls no punches in his depiction of teen angst and racial warfare on the streets of 1996 St. Petersburg, Fla. Suffused with pessimism and an overarching sense of the loneliness of modern American life, the pic affirms a vital alternative to the usual adolescent drama, making even
Larry Clark look tame by comparison." The film was noted for its sequence on top of the
Sunshine Skyway Bridge and for using footage of the 1987 suicide of
R. Budd Dwyer.
The New York Times was also very positive about it and called it "overtly, ingeniously experimental in form" and talked about "the bruised lyricism" of the film being "rooted in intense, even discomfiting, empathy." "Remarkable stuff for a debut film, all the more impressive in that Mr. Fuller wrote the screenplay at 18 and shot the film at 21." ==References==