The Deep Focus: Lean on Pete is a 3-part course exploring how Andrew Haigh dramatizes the search for home and safety in a world you’re not sure you’ll find them.
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Before All of Us Strangers swept the British Independent Film Awards (BIFA)…
Writer-director Andrew Haigh made three of the best films of the century: Weekend, 45 Years, and Lean on Pete.
Lean on Pete is his least well-known of these films…
Despite…
🏆 Winning the Best Young Actor Award at the Venice Film Festival,
🏆 Being nominated for 4 BIFAs
🎭 Having supporting turns from Steve Buscemi, Chloe Sevigny, and Lewis Pullman.
It’s also a direct precursor to All of Us Strangers — even though it’s about a 15-year-old boy in the American West…
Because it’s the first time Haigh explicitly explored the search for home and safety in a world where you’re not sure you’ll find them.
(It’s a theme in all of his films, but not always this directly.)
The Deep Focus: Lean on Pete unfolds over three live (recorded) sessions.
We’ll follow how Charley’s experience of home and care changes across the film:
✨ From a home where love exists but safety is fragile (Session 1)
✨ To a world where Charley learns that care has to be earned (Session 2)
✨ To the possibility of being cared for without having to prove he deserves it — and what that means to him (Session 3)
Along the way, we’ll ask:
❓What counts as home when the only one you’ve known isn’t stable?
❓What happens when the only way to receive care is to be useful?
❓How do you keep searching after disappointment?
❓What changes when someone finally allows you to exist without earning it?
You don’t need to have seen Lean on Pete before joining — though I recommend watching it before our first live session.
You also don’t need any background in film theory or close reading to join.
I’ll guide what we focus on, pause frequently, and help connect the dots as we go.
For the record, The Deep Focus: Lean on Pete is not one of those film programs that:
🤐 Expects you to sit quietly while I lecture, and wonder why you showed up live
😰 Requires you to speak when you’d prefer to listen
📚 Gives you homework between sessions
😵💫 Overwhelms you with the sheer number of participants (it’s small by design)
👋 Or leaves you passively consuming someone else’s interpretation rather than discovering things for yourself
Instead, it’s a 3-part deep dive into quite a few scenes in Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete:
How Charley learns what home is, what it isn’t, and finally, what it can be.
Inside each of the three live sessions, you’ll be:
☺️ In a room with a small group of film enthusiasts
🍿 Watching scenes that you wouldn’t normally watch next to each other
🕵️♀️ Noticing a small detail you might have missed the first time — like how much space Charley is allowed to take up in the frame, and thus in his life
👀 Then seeing how that same pattern shows up again somewhere else
✍️ Putting language to feelings you understood instinctively but couldn’t fully explain
❤️ And in the process, feeling the film even more deeply
“I feel like I have more acute vision and a better understanding of how a director influences what I get out of a film.
Before, I understood what was going on in the character’s head, but could not have said why I felt that way. I wouldn’t have been able to point to, for example, the way he moved the camera in this scene.
The close reading helped me do that. I now understand how the director helped me understand what the character was going through.
And it’s made me understand it more deeply at the same time.”
– Nancy Mills, Indecisions and Revisions: The Worst Person in the World participant, USA
“The close reading gave me a renewed appreciation for looking at clips in detail and the small decisions that go into making art:
seeing the bigger picture in the smaller picture.”
– Sarah Vincent, Indecisions and Revisions: The Worst Person in the World participant, UK
Curious what it’s like to watch a film with more acute vision?
…and to see how the film opens up when you do?
Come spend a few hours inside Lean on Pete with me in The Deep Focus.
The live sessions are May 27, May 31, and June 7.
Live on Zoom — recordings will be available to all participants.
Only 20 seats available.
Two access/concessions seats available — details in the FAQ.
In case we haven’t met yet — I’m Alex Heeney: film critic, educator, and Andrew Haigh scholar.
I’ve been studying Haigh’s work for more than a decade — and I literally wrote the book on his film Lean on Pete.
Think of me as a sidekick saying:
Notice this…ponder that…connect these dots…
What took me more than ten years of research and rewatching to uncover in Haigh’s work, you’ll begin discovering this month.
As featured in…
I’ll guide what we focus on, what scenes we put next to each other, and what questions we keep returning to.
But The Deep Focus is a responsive space, too.
If you notice something the rest of us missed, or want to better understand a particular directorial choice, we can pause and explore it together.
The live sessions are tightly focused around Charley’s search for home.
The Group Space gives us room for tangents, stray observations, and ideas that don’t neatly fit into the session structure.
“The live sessions were given a great deal of thought.
Alex had already spent a lot of time with the films, analyzing the excerpts we looked at in depth.
She shared those insights while also holding space for the contributions of the participants.
Repeated viewings of sequences with and without sound allowed time to digest and discover.”
– N. Graham, participant in The Deep Focus: Oslo, August 31st, USA
“Once Alex pointed out some of the directorial decisions that I missed or misunderstood, it became much easier to understand why those decisions had been made to help us understand more of what was in the main character’s mind… without the character ever saying so!”
– Nancy Mills, participant in Indecisions and Revisions: The Worst Person in the World, USA
Pretty soon, you’ll start noticing the directorial decisions from Lean on Pete in other films, too.
“It’s really effective to have Alex play a film, stop it every 20 seconds, and then we chat. It’s a really good way of actually looking at how something’s put together, how it works, and what it’s doing.
That’s something this format really gives you that you can’t quite get from just going to the cinema and having a coffee with friends after.
When Alex has already picked out key points where a lot is happening with the blocking or the camera movement or something, it really helps you pay attention to those things when you’re seeing them elsewhere in the film — and in other films, too.“
— Hazel S., participant in The Long Take and Reel Ruminators, USA
The difference between The Deep Focus and a one-off workshop isn’t just that it has 3 live sessions.
It’s that each session builds on the last, and moments we spend time on earlier in the film start to shift what you notice later.
The last time I ran one, we spent so much time closely reading tiny details in the opening session that when a later scene echoed something from the beginning, people immediately recognized it.
I didn’t even have to replay the earlier scene.
Because when you spend time with a film in this ongoing way your relationship to it deepens.
Even if you can’t make one or more sessions live (they’re recorded so you can catch up), you’ll still be part of the ongoing exploration of the film — and the way its earlier moments echo through the film.
The Deep Focus: Lean on Pete unfolds across three live sessions — each one building on the last — as we track Charley’s search for home.
Session #1: Stable instability: What does Charley’s initial home look like?
In this 90-minute session, we’ll dig into the first 8 minutes (and 1-2 other scenes) of the film to ask:
- What does home look like for Charley when we meet him?
- What about it is stable or unstable? Welcoming or foreboding?
- How does it stop being a home?
And how do Andrew Haigh’s blocking, shot choices, and beyond help us understand this?
👉Wednesday, May 27 at 4 pm ET on Zoom (recording available)
Session #2: How does Charley learn how conditional care can be?
In this 90-minute session, we’ll do close readings of a few scenes in the middle of the film where Charley learns how precarious relationships can be — and what he needs to do to be safe.
How does Charley learn about what is required to be accepted and cared for (even if just through an economic transaction) when he no longer can rely on his father?
How does he change because of it?
And how does the filmmaking communicate this?
👉Sunday, May 31 at 2:30 pm ET on Zoom (recording available)
Session #3: Finding home — the ending
We’ll wrap with a session on the ending of Lean on Pete — and what it means for Charley’s search for home.
What does he now have that he never had before? And how does Andrew Haigh make this unmistakable?
How does it upend what he learned in the middle of the film about conditions of worth — that care is always conditional, and easily withheld?
The ending calls back to the opening, so we will be thinking back to what’s similar, what’s different, and why it’s a satisfying bookend.
👉Sunday, June 7 at 2:30 pm ET on Zoom (recording available)
The Deep Focus: Lean on Pete is probably for you if:
🧠 You’ve walked away from a film still carrying a feeling you couldn’t quite explain — and wished you could
🎬 You enjoy puzzling out why a film is put together the way it is — and how those choices shape what you feel
🧱 You want more than one opportunity to think about a film — to let meaning accumulate and your relationship to the film evolve
⚡️ You get energized from thinking with other people in real time — where everyone is paying close attention alongside you
👀 You’re as interested in what happens after —
what you start noticing in other films — as you are in what happens in the room during The Deep Focus
And just as importantly:
😌 You don’t want pressure to speak or “perform” your thoughts —
but you do want to be actively engaged in what you’re seeing.
Even if you never say a word, you’ll be tracking patterns, noticing shifts, and following how meaning is being built in real time — not just hearing me explain it after the fact.
🧵 You’d rather follow a clear thread than be dropped into a wide-open discussion.
It’s not for you if:
🚫 You’re looking for a general discussion or debate about the film.
🚫 You want something you can sit back and absorb passively.
🚫 You’d prefer something broad rather than tightly focused on one or two questions.
Curious to see why Charley finally finding home in Lean on Pete hits so hard?
Join me inside The Deep Focus: Lean on Pete so we can discover that together.
We start May 27.
Reserve your seat:
Only 20 seats available.
Two access/concession seats available each round.
See the FAQs for details.
If you’re still wondering whether this is the right time, or the right experience —
I can guarantee that you’re not alone.
This is the first time I’m offering this updated version of The Deep Focus for Lean on Pete — but I’ve been guiding people through film experiences like this for years.
So these questions reflect a mix of what people have asked before joining similar spaces, and what I imagine you might be curious about now.
Do I need any specific film expertise to join The Deep Focus?
Not at all. The Deep Focus is for curious film lovers — whether you’re new to thinking about how films are made or you’ve been paying attention to these details for years.
You don’t need prior expertise — the live sessions will help you notice things step by step.If you’ve ever been moved by a scene and wondered how it did that to you, you’re in the right place.
“I was nervous about stepping in and discussing things that I didn’t know much about. In the end, the atmosphere was accepting and welcoming, so I felt free to join in quite a bit.”
— Sarah Vincent, participant in a pilot of The Deep Focus Workshop #1 on a different film
“The folks who join (in my experience) are overwhelmingly present/curious and not just there to sound smart.“
– Michael Borek, Reel Ruminators Member, USA
Do I have to attend the sessions live on Zoom?
No — although I recommend attending at least one! All live sessions will be recorded, so if one of the dates doesn’t work, you can still follow the journey with us.
If the timing aligns and you have the spoons, joining live can make the experience even richer.
You’ll be able to shape what we focus on and watch ideas evolve in real time as we build on each other’s observations.
Here is the schedule:
Session #1 — Wednesday, May 27 at 4:00 pm ET
Session #2 — Sunday, May 31 at 2:30 pm ET
Session #3 — Sunday, June 7 at 2:30 pm ET
The sessions are scheduled to accomodate as many international time zones as possible — and we often have a mix of North American and European participants.
(All sessions will be recorded.)
“The Zoom sessions were the reason I signed up and the point of interest for me.
One thing the pandemic introduced me to was international study groups and I value that highly as the next-best thing to travel.”
– N. Graham, The Deep Focus: Oslo, August 31st, USA
How much time should I expect to spend on The Deep Focus?
Live sessions: 90 minutes x 3
Watching Lean on Pete: 2h 2mins
What if I miss a session — and can’t watch the recording before June 7?
Because this is designed as a cumulative journey, I recommend making time to catch up with recording you missed before the next session.
But I know life can get in the way! If you’re jumping in having missed part of the journey, you won’t be lost. You just won’t have as deep access to all the nuances of what is happening on screen in the next session.
Although the program ends on June 7, you will have lifetime access to the session recordings.
How do I watch the movies?
You’ll need to rent, buy, or stream the film yourself.
Lean on Pete is available to rent, buy, or stream in Canada, the US, and UK, and is also available on DVD or Blu Ray.
If you’re outside those regions, and you’re not sure if the films will be available in your region (or if there’s a workaround), email me at contact@seventh-row.com, and I will let you know.
Do I get lifetime access?
Yes — you’ll keep access to the materials, so you can revisit anytime, especially as you rewatch these films, or dive into other films!
Save your seat:
It’s capped at 20 people.
What if I can’t afford the full price?
If the full price would make it hard or impossible to join — especially due to disability, chronic illness, care responsibilities, uncertain employment or systemic barriers — the access rate is here for you.
I’ve set aside two access-priced seats in each round of The Deep Focus — available at:
- $148.5 upfront (50% off)
- $103.95/month for 2 months (30% off).
There’s no application and no need to explain your circumstances.
If this applies to you, just email me at contact@seventh-row.com and let me know you’d like one of the access seats.
Spots are first-come, first-served. This is one way I’m working to make sure the space reflects the richness of our wider communities — while also keeping it sustainable for me as the facilitator.
What if I change my mind — is there a refund policy?
Sometimes, something looks right on the surface, but doesn’t feel right once you’re inside.
If you register and find The Deep Focus isn’t for you, you’re welcome to request a full refund any time before the first live session.
After that point, I don’t offer refunds — both because the real-time content is a huge part of the experience, and because you’ll have access to one third of the program.
My hope is that this gives you space to dip your toes in and trust that you’ll know if it’s the right fit.
I have another question!
Email me at contact@seventh-row.com, and I’ll be happy to answer!
Ready to join The Deep Focus: Lean on Pete?
Save your seat: