A quiet stunner. With his assured feature debut, writer-director Lance Hammer explores the tentative relationship between two people on the brink of despair: a suicidal single man (Micheal J. Smith) and his latchkey nephew (JimMyron Ross). With the austere winter landscape of the Mississippi Delta as a backdrop and two novice, riveting actors in the foreground, Hammer turns Ballast into a meditation on forgiveness, compassion and redemption that’s all the more forceful for its simple elegance.
