Naked Gardens

Enter Sunsport Gardens, a family resort in Florida, where residents go about their business, play tennis, do laundry, eat meals, make repairs, celebrate birthdays and hold meetings—all without clothes. In this naturist community, nude is the norm and everyone is accepted as they are.

Over the course of a winter season, leading up to the Mid Winter Festival, Ivette Lucas and Patrick Bresnan immersed themselves, bare-skinned, in this community of non-conformists where the fast-paced, Western consumer society seems to have been abandoned along with clothes. Through their lens we meet the amiable owner of the resort and several of its colorful residents.

However, trouble looms in this paradise, too. Driven by a housing crisis, more and more people are drawn to the community primarily as a cheap place to live. This means the standard of nudity—a norm, though not a rule—is no longer a commonly shared practice. Will this place preserve its unique character? In observational, direct cinema-style, all is filmed at a leisurely pace, with close attention for various individuals, and without judgment—precisely the way the people in the Gardens deal with each other.