Fremont: A Cinematic Tone Poem of Displacement and Possibility
In Babak Jalali's Fremont, cinema becomes poetry — a delicate cartography of human longing mapped across monochrome landscapes. Sahar, an Afghan refugee working in a fortune cookie factory, navigates her new life with a quiet, determined resilience.
Take the moment her Chinese factory owners gift her a deer—seemingly random, until you understand the profound symbolism. Rooted in the Jataka Tales, the deer represents selflessness and courage, a Buddhist parable about sacrifice that reflects Sahar's own journey of transformation. (Sahar: "I worked with the enemy to ensure your security!")
The film breathes in black and white, each frame a stanza of quiet revelation. The film's monochrome enhances the colorless landscape of the poem. When Gregg Turkington's psychiatrist comedically weeps while reading White Fang, or when Salim, the film's Shakespearean witch device, delivers philosophical pronouncements about stars and love's complicated geography, Jalali reveals how displacement is not just a physical journey, but requires an emotional metamorphosis.
Sahar's precise fortune cookie writing is a longing to direct her own fortune. Traveling from Fremont to San Francisco to interact with "another culture" is her desire to integrate somewhere, to belong.
Everything about this film — the script, Jalali's choices, the metaphors, the intimate cinematography, the acting — it all works so well. I get the references to Jarmusch and Kaurismäki, but in my opinion, this film is in the class with Wender's seminal tone poem, Wings of Desire. Fremont is THE cinematic tone poem of the 21st century.
This isn't just narrative. Fremont is fluid metaphor — a poem written in light and shadow, in quiet tone, and in the unspoken languages of emigration and survival.