About Leave No Trace
A veteran with PTSD and his thirteen-year-old daughter live in the Forest Park woods on the edge of Portland until a jogger stumbles across their camp. Debra Granik tells the story almost entirely in actions and silences and ends in a corner of rural Washington that feels exactly right.
Released in 2018 and running a tight 1h 49m, Leave No Trace sits firmly in the drama tradition that American art-house cinemas have spent the last two decades quietly defending. The film is rated PG and presented in English.
Director: Debra Granik
Debra Granik belongs to the cohort of directors whose work tends to land first at festivals — Sundance, Locarno, the New York Film Festival, SXSW — before opening on a small handful of screens in New York and Los Angeles and then rolling out, week by week, to the independent circuit elsewhere in the country. Leave No Trace is part of that pipeline. It is the only title from Debra Granik currently in our directory; if you want to keep tabs on the director's other work, follow festival-circuit coverage from the outlets that track independent distribution.
Cast
The principal cast — Ben Foster, Thomasin McKenzie, Dale Dickey — is the kind of ensemble that art-house audiences will recognize from adjacent festival titles. Independent casting tends to favor performers who can carry a long take, hold a quiet scene, and trust a director's control of pace; this film is no exception.
Where to watch Leave No Trace
Our seasonal catalog — an editorial sample of the circuit, not a live ticketing feed — places it at independent cinemas in 12 US cities. Coverage is deepest in:
- Milwaukee, WI — listed at 4 independent cinemas.
- New York, NY — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Seattle, WA — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Santa Cruz, CA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Orem, UT — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Park City, UT — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Tampa, FL — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Houston, TX — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Williamstown, MA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Ambler, PA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Bluffton, OH — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Bloomington, MN — listed at 1 independent cinema.
If your city isn't on the list, the film may still surface on a future repertory week or festival weekend; check our full cinema directory.
Why it belongs on the indie circuit
The independent and art-house exhibition circuit exists to surface films like this one — work that doesn't fit the wide-release calendar, doesn't have the marketing budget of a studio tentpole, and depends instead on programmers, critics, and word-of-mouth to find an audience. Leave No Trace is a clean fit for that model: a 1h 49m drama work, made outside the studio system, that benefits from being seen on a real screen with a real audience rather than queued up on a streaming dashboard. The cinemas in the cities listed above are the venues doing that work for this title.
Cross-references
If you are building a viewing schedule around this film, our Drama genre hub indexes adjacent work in the same tradition.