'Fremont' Is One of the Year's Best Undiscovered Gems

By Petr Navovy | Film | October 20, 2023 |

By Petr Navovy | Film | October 20, 2023 |

Maybe it was the strong impression that Celine Song’s Past Lives left on me after the credits rolled, but it feels as if there is a rich spring of debut talents in cinema at the moment. In an environment that is increasingly hostile towards independent filmmaking and obsessed with corporate consolidation and IP extension, it’s more heartening than ever to see new life flowing into the scene.

Writer-director Babak Jalali (Radio Dreams, Land) is not a newcomer, but the lead in his new film, Fremont, is. In her debut role, Anaita Wali Zada plays Donya, a young Afghan from Kabul who worked as a translator for the US Army so that she could escape to what she hoped would be a safer life. Now, living in the titular city and working in a Chinese fortune cookie factory, Donya finds herself living a life that is largely free from external conflict (America doesn’t bomb itself as much) but still riven by internal strife.

Zada is tremendous in Fremont. The film’s minimalist script and layers of subtly folded drama require an actor who is able to communicate volumes with just a glance or a small change in expression, and Zada is more than up to the challenge. The word ‘Jarmuschian’ is thrown around a lot when it comes to indies that stray anywhere close to the iconic director’s stylistic ballpark, but Fremont earns that title. Idiosyncratic characters appear in long, wordless medium shots, the focus more on mood and atmosphere above traditional plotting, yet like the best Jarmusch films, it emphasises the humanity at its core instead of drowning it in self-conscious quirk and irrelevance (like so many cheap imitators do or the worst of the director’s oeuvre falls prey to, *cough* sorry The Limits Of Control *cough*).

When the film opens, we see the three main pillars of Donya’s life: The small Afghan community in the apartment complex she resides, the friendly co-workers she has at work, and a chatty, elderly, soap-opera addicted, Afghan friend who runs a restaurant that Donya frequents (though seemingly no one else does, at least at the times Donya is there). It’s not a bad life, but Donya finds herself suffering from a bad bout of insomnia. Thanks to a friend, and some truly impressive tenacity shown in the face of American bureaucracy, she manages to wrangle herself some sessions with a therapist (a drolly effective Gregg Turkington). All the laconic (at least now, in America) Donya wants is a prescription for some sleeping pills, but the therapist intuits that there might be some value in helping his patient unpack things and so insists on repeated sessions. This, along with the sudden promotion at her job to the person who actually writes the fortunes in the fortune cookies themselves, upsets the quiet routine of Donya’s life, and we see the ripples of it over the course of the movie’s ninety-one minutes.

Co-written by Carolina Cavalli (Amanda), Fremont is a film that treads the line of ‘slight, not superficial’. It has plenty to say—about imperialism, the immigrant experience, mental health—without veering into didacticism, and it’s shot (in a tight, 1.33:1 aspect ratio) with a great eye for black and white photography, featuring some strikingly memorable compositions. It might leave some viewers wanting more, but for those of us attuned to these filmmaking rhythms, there’s plenty to chew on here.

‘Fremont’ is currently available on digital.