Please Give

Filmmaker: Directed by Nicole Holofcener

USA / 2010 / 90 min / English

Opening Weekend Date: 18 June 2010

Check out our exclusive interview with Director and Screenwriter Nicole Holofcener, on the Birds Eye View Blog.

As Kate, Alex, and Abby interact with the people next door, with each other, and with their New York surroundings, a complex mix of animosity, friendship, deception, guilt, and love plays out with both sharp humor and pathos. Please Give is writer/director Nicole Holofcener's perceptive-and devastatingly funny-take on modern life's contradictions, good intentions and shaky moral bearings.

Kate (Catherine Keener) has a lot on her mind. There's the ethics problem of buying furniture on the cheap at estate sales and marking it up at her trendy Manhattan store (and how much markup can she get away with?). There's the materialism problem of not wanting her teenage daughter (Sarah Steele) to want the expensive things that Kate wants. There's the marriage problem of sharing a partnership in parenting, business, and life with her husband Alex (Oliver Platt) but sensing doubt nibbling at the foundations. And there's Kate's free-floating 21st century malaise-the problem of how to live well and be a good person when poverty, homelessness, and sadness are always right outside the door.

Nicole Holofcener (Writer-Director)

Critically acclaimed writer-director Nicole Holofcener was born in New York City and moved with her family to Los Angeles when she was twelve. She worked on several movies as a production assistant and as an apprentice editor before she gave film school a shot. At the Columbia Graduate Film Program she made a short, It's Richard I Love, and then another entitled Angry, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Her first feature, Walking and Talking, sold to Miramax at the Sundance Festival a few years later, and her second feature, Lovely & Amazing, was released by Lions Gate. She has since made Friends with Money and her latest is Please Give. Nicole has also directed several episodes of television, such as Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, and most recently, Bored To Death. She lives in Venice, California with her two sons.