London-based Iranian film-maker Babak Jalali has crafted this droll, ruminative, engaging indie picture in luminous black-and-white featuring deadpan, dead-slow dialogue exchanges with more than a little of early Jim Jarmusch.
It’s set in Fremont, California, the town with the biggest Afghan community in the US, and real-life Afghan refugee and former TV news presenter Anaita Wali Zada plays Donya, a former translator for the US army who has now taken up residency in a dispiritingly featureless apartment block along with other expats. She’s dealing with insomnia and survivor’s guilt, thinking about the way her life choices have endangered her family back in the old country where any association with America is pure poison.
