What's it like to live in northwestern Nevada, U.S.?
Sparks
The film enjoyed its world premiere at SXSW 2026. Visit the film's official festival page for more information.
In his light and likable feature film debut, writer/director Fergus Campbell establishes that the town of Sparks, Nevada, population around 100,000, is a pleasantly agreeable place to live. It's unhurried, and is surrounded by a landscape that is sparsely beautiful, perhaps most notable for a nearby reservoir. Overall, it's peaceful and lovely.
Yet it's missing the cosmopolitan flavors that young people gravitate toward, which is probably what leads a group of friends to gather at the reservoir every month, where legend has it that a portal opens up, enabling time travel.
Cleo (Elsie Fisher) enters into this bucolic atmosphere like a stereotypical bull in a china shop. The teen has just moved to town with her mother, with whom she fights every day. One day, Cleo storms off, in a foul mood, when she sees a vending machine, improbably sitting in the middle of the road. Shrugging, Cleo buys a pack of cigarettes and starts to walk away, when the machine dispenses something else: a paperback copy of a book on Jean-Luc Godard.
Naturally, she becomes obsessed with it. Waiting at a bus stop with Odette (Madison Hu), she is entirely open to the idea of joining the previously-mentioned group of reservoir-visiting friends as they aimlessly lark around town, shoplifting and getting into mischief.
Cleo, however, is more focused than her new friends. She desperately wants to leave Sparks, Nevada, and move somewhere else. It could be anywhere, really, but reading about Godard makes her yearn for life in Paris in the early 1960s. If only there was a way to travel through time ...
Principally, Sparks feels like an amiable hang-out movie. Cleo's new friends have a home base in a van, parked in a closed drive-in movie complex, so they fix up a way to watch movies again, projected from a computer onto a big screen, where they take turns picking a movie to watch. Naturally, Cleo wants to watch Godard's Breathless (1960).
Although Cleo's strong personality would seem to make her a natural leader, she is not interested in any kind of leadership. Instead, she is determined to follow her own path and trust her own instincts. The group of friends -- Thomas Deen Baker, Julia D'Angelo, Charlie B. Foster, Denny McAuliffe, Simon Downes Toney -- are a true ensemble of players, who don't outshine one another. Instead they are deking and duking through a late adolescent period of life in which they are definitely no longer children, yet definitely not adults. They are not sure what they want to do, but time travel seems like it could be fun, if they could ever figure out how to do it.
On the other hand, Elsie Fisher makes Cleo stand out in her own life and among her peers. She does this without shoving anyone else out of the spotlight, but her personality, her drive, and her rough charms act like a magnet. Everyone is drawn to her, while she barely notices anyone else.
Fergus Campbell drives the film as writer and director, imbuing it with a friendly spirit that is irresistible. Stronger together than any of its individual parts, Sparks plays out like an adventure of the mind and soul, stirring and altogether pleasant.