The fourth film from Iranian-American director Babak Jalali is an utter delight: a wry, Jarmuschian musing on the human connections and possibilities that spark in the most unexpected places.
Donya (a magnetic performance from newcomer Anaita Wali Zada) worked as an Afghan translator for the US before the Taliban returned to power. Now she has a tiny bedsit in Fremont, California surrounded by other Afghans who fled the regime. And she works in a fortune cookie factory, composing enigmatic mottoes to be enclosed in a crunchy sugar casing. She’s one of the lucky ones. But Donya can’t help feeling that her own fortune is a blank slip, her hopes for the future erased by her exile. So one day she sends a message out to the world on a cookie slip: “Desperate for a dream”, with her name and number.
It’s admirably understated film-making, shot in restrained black and white, with a tight aspect ratio that evokes the walls closing in around Donya during the long insomniac nights. A sparse, loose-limbed jazz score adds to the picture’s gauche charm. And Jeremy Allen White (star of TV series The Bear) tears out our hearts with two immaculate scenes of inarticulate longing.
