Movie Mentions: Fremont, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt & Inshallah a Boy
Fremont (2023)
Directed by Babak Jalali. 3.5/5 stars
Babak Jalali’s Fremont is a perfect example of a big story being told with a small film. It’s not epic or sweeping, nor does it offer the kind of easy solutions mainstream audiences often crave. What it does is artfully and compassionately examine loneliness, survivors’ guilt, and refugee experiences, all while managing to remain humorous and optimistic with a nearly deadpan delivery. The film follows Donya (Anaita Wali Zada, who is nothing short of fantastic), a refugee from Afghanistan who served as a translator for the U.S. Army. After arriving in Fremont, California, eight months prior, Donya begins to have trouble sleeping due to the shame she feels over being branded a traitor in Kabul and for leaving her home and family behind. It’s a tricky situation that could easily have boiled over into over-sentimentalization, but Jalali handles Donya’s predicament with delicate hands that never push her too hard to reveal more than she wants. The results are earnest and heartfelt revelations that feel genuine rather than forced simply for plot’s sake. All the while, and despite the serious nature of its underlying subject matter, Fremont remains an uplifting experience full of small, quirky, and often entertaining moments that fit right in with the little world it’s created.
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023)
Directed by Raven Jackson. 3/5 stars
The visual poetry of Raven Jackson’s debut feature, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, may not evoke the same kind of power or philosophical introspection as Terrence Malick or Andrei Tarkovsky, but those are admittedly big shoes to fill. However, that these luminaries of non-linear and metaphysical cinema are even mentioned in the same sentence as Jackson is a ringing endorsement for her burgeoning career and a statement of gleeful expectation for her next project. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt doesn’t fire on all cylinders, but Jackon’s tactile approach to filmmaking is a sight to behold. Every grain of sand and warm embrace can be felt through her lens, and every salty tear can be tasted, even if she makes us work harder than needed to understand the full context of their meaning in her decades-spanning story.
Inshallah a Boy (2024)
Directed by Amjad Al Rasheed. 3/5 stars
Amjad Al Rasheed’s Inshallah a Boy, and specifically Palestinian-born actress Mouna Hawa’s performance in it, serves up an admirable mixture of defiant self-reliance in a world trying its hardest to prevent such a thing from happening. It often plays more like a thriller than the family drama it essentially is, with moments of intense emotional outbursts surrounded by nearly silent spans of terrified desperation. It may not always fit together as nicely as it should, but thanks to Hawa’s raw determination as Nawal, a newly-widowed woman in Jordan about to lose her home thanks to archaic and misogynistic inheritance laws, it works where it needs to most.
