Blue Bayou

Korean-American writer/director/actor Justin Chon has created in Blue Bayou an insistent modern fable set in New Orleans that packs devastating impact. In this beautiful and painful film, Chon plays Antonio LaBlanc, a Korean immigrant brought to American by adoptive parents when he was three and raised in Louisiana. Antonio is married to the loving and pregnant Kathy (Alicia Vikander), and is the doting step-father to Kathy's precocious daughter Jessie (Sydney Kowaslske). 

Events lead to an encounter with the police, among them Kathy's ex-husband and Jessie's father Ace (Mark O'Brien), who abandoned the family shortly after his daughter was born. Antonio, who makes "honest money" as a tattoo artist and "dirty money" boosting motorcycles, is threatened with deportation after the run-in with the cops and the vise of America's immigration policies begins to tighten around him and his family. 

Watching human and system failures is always gut-wrenching, but Chon mixes Antonio's personal agony with the story of a Vietnamese woman named Parker (Linh Dan Pham), who is dying of cancer. She wants a tattoo of a fleur-de-lis as it reminds of her home. From that encounter, Parker shares some of her life and wisdom about being both rooted and rootless, as so many of the Dreamers are. 

Chon, who is not an immigrant, has rich insight about the mental and emotional terrain inhabited by those who are brought to the land of opportunity, conditionally, and with little recourse if access is suddenly denied. All many of them have are tears and broken hearts -- much like the audiences for this wonderful picture.