Foreign Letters

Typical ignorant, mangecake bullies bullying like always. Very compelling story told in a unique way. Loved it.

Word for word this movie described my life. I couldn't wait for it to be over so I could write a review. It felt more like a documentary than a fictional story, probably because the producer wrote from experience, but how she captured every second of that time is beautiful. 30 minutes in felt like hours because of the details of every moment. We see the world, but also how Ellie sees it alongside it. The film is well paced and the narrative choice is brilliant. In other words, it's effortless. I feel the movie was straight from the heart and moved along naturally with nostalgia rather than pain for her childhood. It is a movie set in reality rather than fantasy. Blah blah blah, just see it. It's good.

The lessons learned from childhood friendships apply to friendships between adults. In this simple yet profound story are thought provoking issues about expectations, disappointment, and forgiveness. It's also about alienation, loneliness and the difficulty of assimilation. This is the kind of film that stays with you long after you've seen it. There are no special effects, no sex, no violence and yet there wasn't one moment where I wasn't fully involved and totally absorbed. I know the acting was good because there wasn't one second that I was aware that they were acting. This is an excellent movie to watch with children or grandchildren.

A super sweet remembrance of a friendship between immigrants, one girl from Israel (Noa Rotstein), and the other from Vietnam (Dalena Le). It visits a lot of the topics you'd expect, e.g. the difficulty of learning a new language, the cruelty of other girls towards an outsider, and the trials and tribulations of friendship. It gets a little saccharine when the soundtrack is cued at emotional moments, but it's always heartfelt. One of my favorite moments was when we hear the teacher's voice from the perspective of the girl, completely garbled, because she hasn't learned enough English yet - and then the observation that "Maps in America cut Asia in half so that their country is at the center of the world." The ending with footage of the real people 30 years afterwards is pretty cool too, as was finding out that Thuy really did stand out on the doorstep for two hours. A gentle and touching work from Ela Their, who also plays Ellie's mom.

FOREIGN LETTERS (2011)

I know, I know, I *should* be watching all eighty episodes of Game of Thrones, but instead I just watched an exquisite, gentle, autobigraphical film about two twelve-year-old girls, Ellie and Thuy, both immigrants to America because their families left their home countries, Israel and Vietnam, due to war. A quiet character study, this film is intimate, real, and a bit quirky. The music is lovely. If you like this sort of human portrait story, I recommend this. I saw it on Kanopy, available through the public library.