Fremont (2023)

Understated and muted, heart-warming piece - Fremont review by PD

This is a small-scale, muted mood piece, full of delicate understatement. It centres on the seldom-explored Afghan immigrant milieu: the droll decision of director Babak Jalali to plonk his young protagonist down in a family-run (and remarkably kindly) Chinese fortune cookie factory setting up an intriguing premise which is (broadly) well-sustained throughout the film. Anaita Wali Zada — a former national tv presenter forced to flee the Taliban after the fall of Kabul — is wonderful as Donya, a former translator at U.S. Army bases - a “traitorous” background earning her the subdued hostility of a neighbour living in the same housing complex populated by Afghan refugees in the San Francisco Bay Area city that gives the film its title. Shooting in black and white, Jalali keeps the focus tight on Donya as she works on the short assembly line at 'Hand-Made Fortune Cookies', but her essential loneliness is (perhaps a tad conveniently) dissipated by a remarkably astute (if rather unbelievable) psychologist, and, crucially, a friend-in-need co-worker which sets up a plot shift which we follow with some interest, and though it ends up all a bit too sentimental for my liking, we are nevertheless persuaded by the film's insistence on the healing possibilities of the human heart, which ultimately gives the film a lot of weight. Well worth a look.