À la recherche de la liberté

This movie was a pretty good watch. Having been in Afghanistan, and Iraq this movie brought the situation out loud and clear to my wife. She needed to see this. The movie does seek show sympathy with the persons seeking asylum and doesn't show the INS in a good light. But, the process was and is necessary. I didn't see them as evil, I would have done the same.

Look at the movie for what it was intended, a drama, and don't take it as an affront to our immigration system. If you do, you will like it.

Libby (Juliette Lewis) is a busy corporate lawyer forced to take on more pro bono hours. She reluctantly takes on an asylum seeking Afghan woman.

Layla Alizada plays the refugee Meena who arrives pre 9-11. Then 9-11 happens. Juliette Lewis is now a veteran actress, and does a good job as the uncaring lawyer who grow to fight for this case.

This is a lower budget TV movie. It gets a bit slow at times. There is some good insightful look at Taliban regime, and the difficulties of the asylum system. It's nice to see Juliette Lewis doing good work, and not just the usual flaky characters.

This was a fictionalized, but based on true events, account of a hard edged young corporate lawyer (Juliette Lewis, very good in an atypical role) taking the responsibility to defend an asylum seeker from Afghanistan. Movies like this at times too often focus on the star, but there are enough scenes about the asylum seeker's life back in Afghanistan and struggles in detention that it was overall a balanced account. The newcomer playing the asylum seeker was not very expressive at times, but was very good too.

A touching, heartfelt movie that has a predictable message, but is well put together and not just your average movie of the week sort of movie. We even have some sympathy for the government, in theory one of the heavies of the movie, suggesting the balance provided. The Taliban doesn't come off well though ... no shock there! For instance, a major plot point is the need for proof of identity, which on its face doesn't really seem to be that unjust for the government to be concerned about. Court TV did a good job with this one.

I agree with the poster below that the INS makes the decisions that it needs to make based on the facts presented, and that in the movie, the asylum-seeking process is made much more difficult for the main character because of the fact that she'd disposed of her identification papers back in Afghanistan. However, I don't think this weakens the movie at all. I think it added an important dimension to it by showing that the asylum-seeking process is difficult, even for people who are deserving of asylum, because it's necessary to weed out terrorists and other potential bad apples. The movie didn't come across to me as liberally biased at all.

I agree that Lewis' character was a little over the top, but overall I thought the movie was very well done.

Court TV deserves some kudos for this film. Layla Alizada in her first major role as the desperate asylum applicant fleeing from Taliban-controlled Afghan really makes us care about her plight. The flashback scenes from her past hark back to those clandestinely filmed scenes of brutality toward women that were smuggled out of that country. Her acting is understated and moving. Juliette Lewis' performance as the securities lawyer who is a fish-out-of-water in the New York immigration courts is less convincing, but it doesn't undermine the power of the film too much.

It is a well-done depiction of the many hurdles that our immigration system places on those who manage to escape terrible oppression and make it here without their `papers.' I don't deny the difficulties facing immigration judges in presiding over such a system, but the Bush Administration's policy of automatic detention (read `jail') of asylum applicants (often lengthy) and its removal of sympathetic Board of Immigration Appeals members has made this situation worse.

Every member of Congress ought to see this film-but it is also a compelling story well told.