Where God Left His Shoes: Press

PRESS INFORMATION
For press information, please e-mail David Postman at Vulcan Productions.

For press photo downloads, please go the Gallery page.

Click here to download the Press Kit (Format: PDF/150 KB).

AWARDS
Winner - 2007 Humanitas Prize, Best Sundance Feature Film
"For its unblinking look at the desperation inherent in poverty and homelessness, for its edgy portrayal of a father and stepson trying to connect and for its implicit belief that a family can be the strongest refuge in adversity."

– John Horn, Humanitas Prize Trustee

Nominated - Best Film
Nominated - Best Actor - John Leguizamo
Winner - Best Supporting Actress - Leonor Varela
Nominated - Best Supporting Actor - David Castro
2008 Imagen Awards

REVIEWS
Authentically heartwarming—an achievement which cannot be under-rated in a culture today which is drenched in cheap sentiment and ready saccharine. Leguizamo has never been better, conveying the optimism and simplicity of the man without rendering him stupid; his scenes with the superbly natural child actor David Castro (a veteran of five movies including Palindromes and A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints) are the film's best.

Perhaps the film's biggest accomplishment is to portray so effectively—and far more effectively than last year's The Pursuit Of Happyness—the day-today realities of homelessness.

– Mike Goodridge, Screen International

Given John Leguizamo's knockout perf, sentimentality never dares raise its head, and the improbably stacked deck from which his character is dealt gives the pic's would-be "neo-realist" premise a peculiar edge. Appealing to cynics and softies alike, "Shoes" could prove a small-scale holiday sleeper Stateside. Its approach to the material is cannily conceived: The extent to which the script deliberately brings up every hackneyed trope in the Christmas movie canon reps a sophisticated and somewhat subversive version of Hollywood's penchant for having its sad/happy endings read both ways.

– Ronnie Schieb, Daily Variety

John Leguizamo gives his truest performance on film as a failed boxer in Salvatore Stabile’s emotional roller-coaster Where God Left His Shoes. Axed from the card of an upcoming bout, he loses his apartment and goes with his wife (Leonor Varela) and two children (David Castro, Samantha Rose) into a homeless shelter. The acting, the on-the-fly atmosphere (the film was shot quickly), and Leguizamo’s increasingly urgent hustle are deeply evocative, but parts of the movie are almost too painful to endure.

– David Edelstein, New York Magazine

Italian neorealism meets A Christmas Carol in NYC in Where God Left His Shoes. Jobless and living with his family in a homeless shelter, a onetime boxer (John Leguizamo) takes his 10-year-old stepson (David Castro) with him as he hustles for work on Christmas Eve. Writer-director Salvatore Stabile has a good eye for the details of hard-luck ordinariness, and he sketches believable family bonds with a minimum of flourish. Best is Castro, a forthright young actor with liquid eyes. B+

– Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

Undercard boxer Frank Diaz (John Leguizamo) is a ring slickster whose lack of jaw and heart has kept his looks while eroding his self-worth. He’s supporting a family on one of those “one paycheck away from the street” budgets when that one paycheck doesn’t come. Leguizamo, working at a scramble, gets more on-screen traction than in recent memory; the father-son rapport is bullyish-fraternal, including raunch ribbing about girls and schoolyard sex-ed (“You can’t go raw-dog these days”).

– Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice