Review: The Quest for Home by Desperate Immigrants Is the Theme of Routes at Remy Bumppo

In Saint Omer, filmmaker Alice Diop applies her documentary skills to her first narrative film, based on an actual event that gripped France in 2016. Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a young Senegalese immigrant, is accused of killing her 15-month-old daughter by leaving her on the beach at night to be drowned by the tide. Diop uses transcripts from the hearings on the French culture. Most of the film takes place in the claustrophobic courtroom in Saint Omer, a town in northeastern France.

I suspect that for Cambodians and Cambodian Americans, the racist and genocidal history of the Khmer Rouge is a stain on their history just as slavery, racism and the Civil War are for Americans. A history that cannot—and should not—ever be forgotten. Bald Sisters, Vichet Chum’s world premiere at Steppenwolf Theatre, begins and ends with memories of the Khmer Rouge. Directed by Jesca Prudencio, the play is on the surface a story of family and sisterhood with strong undercurrents of the nature of immigrant life and the search for identity in a new home country. You’ll find plenty of humor along with the sadness in Chum’s story, but the play as a whole is unsatisfying and incomplete.

Princess Ivona inspires Trap Door Theatre to show us what it does best: Take a clever script and turn it into a carnival with exaggerated style and physical performance, while remaining true to the playwright’s original concept. In this case, Jenny Beacraft directs playwright Witold Gombrowicz’s 1935 tragicomedy, an anti-nationalist satire on class and identity, and embellishes it with an exuberant use of props, costumes and makeup. Beacraft, who grew up in Chicago, is now based in Barcelona; she has participated in several Trap Door international productions.

The themes and subject matter covered in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest drama, a moving, gentle story of chosen family, desperate connection and generational trauma, are not easily navigated. And in lesser hands, Broker would only succeed as a smarmy, mediocre gangster film that goes too dark for its own good, and that would be a very different movie indeed. Instead, Kore-eda, who also wrote the script, ably and beautifully guides us through a story about seemingly impossible choices, the unexpected complications the world often throws at us, and how in the end, all any of us are looking for is a place, literally and figuratively, to be safe.

“Water is a complicated element. It heals, destroys, rescues, erases. It drowns. It saves. It holds memory. It washes away pain….” That statement by Janice, the narrator in the ripple, the wave that carried me home, is a dramatic summary of the play itself. Directed by Jackson Gay, the play by Christina Anderson is now on stage in a world premiere co-production at Goodman Theatre with Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

Dan Gooding met his now-husband in Spain. They decided to marry to be together. The immigration process stalled their plans for over 18 months.

Trying to discern Netflix’s release strategy on any given film is about as productive an exercise as shoveling your sidewalk while it’s still snowing. You’ll never really get anywhere, and you’ll just feel bad about yourself for trying. So far this year, the streamer/film studio has confounded moviegoers by keeping many of their best films from movie theaters all together, while sending some to cinemas for a week or two only to remove them entirely for weeks in advance of their debut on the platform (ahem, Glass Onion). One of the behemoth’s last releases of 2022 is getting a similarly confusing release, one that will ultimately risk what should be a strong showing for The Pale Blue Eye, a macabre period drama and mystery based on the 2003 book by Louis Bayard that’s a gripping, emotional whodunit perfect for gray rainy days and moody, chilly evenings.

In 2018, writer Sev Ohanian and writer/director Aneesh Chaganty released a unique and tension-filled missing-person mystery calling Searching that features a story told entirely on screens—as in computer and phone screens, with multiple windows open, while a father (John Cho) looked frantically for his missing daughter using only the resources available to him online. Having moved fully over to executive producer roles, the filmmakers (who also get a story credit) have made Missing using their editors from Searching, Will Merrick and Nick Johnson, as writers/directors of a story about a teenage girl named June (Storm Reid) whose mother Grace (Nia Long) goes missing while on vacation in Colombia with her new boyfriend Kevin (Ken Leung).

Shot by cinematographer Luc Montpellier in muted tones that almost make the film look like it was shot in black-and-white and then tinted to match the mood of each moment, writer/director Sarah Polley’s Women Talking (based on the book by Miriam Toews) centers on a religious community whose normally powerless women are tasked with finding a solution to a rampant problem within the colony. Several of the men have been committing sexual assaults in the night. Once the perpetrators were identified, the men left the community for a time, and the women had to decide whether they wanted to forgive the offending men and carry on with life as normal or whether they want to leave the colony and start a new one somewhere else, taking only the children with them.

We’re just over a decade of Tomorrow Never Knows festivals and they just keep getting better. TNK takes over a nice collection of local venues every January (save for that one COVID year) and has always been a pretty good barometer of the indie music scene. This year continues that with some amazing shows on the lineup. For night one of this year’s TNK I go tthe chance to see some favorites of mine at Schubas: V.V. Lightbody, Free Range, and Tomberlin!