Life can be so confusing at times that we really don’t know where we stand with it, other than having a clear sense that what we’re experiencing isn’t working and that we desperately need direction to help fix it. But who are we to turn to if we have few friends and no family for meaningful, helpful guidance? Peers? Co-workers? A psychiatrist? Such is the fate of Donya (Anita Wali Zada), an Afghan transplant living…

This starts off with what has to be slowest, least efficient, example of the industrialisation process that I've ever seen! Those images rather set the scene for what follows as we meet fortune cookie maker "Donya" (a strong performance from Anaita Wali Zada). She was an interpreter for the US military in her native Afghanistan and has arrived in California on a special visa scheme and is awaiting proper settlement.…

Fremont: A Cinematic Tone Poem of Displacement and Possibility In Babak Jalali's Fremont, cinema becomes poetry — a delicate cartography of human longing mapped across monochrome landscapes. Sahar, an Afghan refugee working in a fortune cookie factory, navigates her new life with a quiet, determined resilience. Take the moment her Chinese factory owners gift her a deer—seemingly random, until you understand…