AMERICA

• Fremont, a Sundance film by director Babak Jalali.
• Fremont is an intimate, endearing, and melancholy picture of loneliness.
• It is a restless immigrant story that conveys a sense of longing for a home left behind.

Fremont, a Sundance film by director Babak Jalali, is a restless immigrant story that beautifully conveys the human desire for connection and a sense of longing for a home left behind. Fremont is an intimate, endearing, and melancholy picture of loneliness and people forgotten by the country they served. It was shot in stark black and white and frequently centres on the movie’s focus, Donya, who is played by Anaita Wali Zada in her screen debut.

Donya is a refugee who resides in a tiny Afghan neighbourhood in the Bay Area. She worked as an interpreter for US troops before fleeing to America with her family to escape the Taliban. Donya has little money, no insurance, no family, or friends despite working at a factory that neatly packages greetings into fortune cookies. Donya visits a psychiatrist to get prescription sleeping medications since her guilt keeps her awake at night (Gregg Turkington). They start a quest to unpack some of Donya’s enormous baggage when the doctor maintains he needs a few more sessions with her before prescribing. Jeremy Allen White from The Bear also appears in Fremont as Daniel, a mechanic with whom Donya develops a bond.

Jalali, Zada, and Turkington visited the Collider Studio in Park City after the Sundance premiere of Fremont. Zada describes how she went from working as a journalist in Afghanistan to having a major role in a Sundance film while speaking with Collider’s Steve Weintraub. Jalali explains how the black-and-white technique was used, the way by which he and cinematographer Laura Valladao framed shots, and how the cast and crew made Fremont possible on an independent film budget and timeline. He also discusses the motivation for the story of Fremont. Turkington talks about his “erratic, weird” persona and praises his co-star Zada for their on-screen chemistry. You may view the interview in the video up top or scroll down to read the whole transcript.

Collider says: “The reason I get to be here today is to talk to the people behind Fremont, and I really want to give you congratulations and say how much I enjoyed your movie. Most people who are watching this interview right now will have not seen the film yet so how have you been describing it to friends and family?”

Babak Jalali says: “Thank you for having us here. To friends and family, to anyone, it’s a story about a young Afghan woman who used to work as a translator for the US military, and has recently moved to the Bay Area and lives in the city of Fremont, which is right outside San Francisco, and by day works in a Chinese fortune cookie factory. It’s about someone restarting their life, a stranger in a strange land.”

Anaita was asked, “Anaita, you have never made a film before, and I really want to know how you got involved in this, and what the experience was like being front and centre in a movie.”

Anaita says: “Thank you so much. Yes, that was my first time acting in a movie. First, I received an email from one of my friends, and I sent an email to Babak, and we had so many Zoom [calls]. After that we decided to work together. Actually, he decided to work with me [laughs].”

While laughing she says, “I was going to say, it was probably his decision.”

Zada says: “Yeah, exactly.

What was it like, the experience of making a movie compared to what you thought it would be?”

Zada continued: “I have to say, I worked as a journalist in Afghanistan for two years, so I had experience in front of [the] camera and microphone, so it was, for me, easy to be in front of cameras. But working with the cast and film crew and director was like the first time. I enjoyed it and I learned a lot from it, and also, from Daniel’s character.

You play an integral part in this film. Can you talk about who you play and what it was about this part that said, ‘I want to do this?'”

Gregg added: “Well, I play a doctor, a psychiatrist, who’s – I’ve heard somebody call him eccentric recently, which was maybe a kinder description than I’ve been using, what I’ve been telling people about it. But yeah, just an oddball psychiatrist. I guess one of these people that, probably, when he started in the profession was quite good, but has maybe gone to seed over the years.

Basically, when Babak reached out and I read the script, I was just excited to have been asked, you know, as opposed to like when I got the script to audition for the Elmer Fudd movie. No. But this, I mean it’s a beautiful, beautifully written script and it’s kind of a dream, really, to get something like that and be offered a role in it when the quality is glaring from the get-go.”

After a long talk Jalali added, “100%. One of the things that I appreciate is that, there are a lot of people who helped America in Afghanistan that have been brought over to America, and I don’t want to say that they’re forgotten about, but they’re forgotten about. Was that one of the reasons why you felt compelled to tell this story?”

‘Originally, when I heard about translators living in Fremont, that’s what drew my attention because of the way they were living. They had been forgotten about, neglected, and things like that. The original idea of doing a film about a translator stemmed from that, and I found it shocking, but the story sort of changed. The reality is that yes, there are people who risked their lives for America over there and once they came here, they were abandoned, which is something that’s often repeated in history.’

Zada in the end added: “Thank you so much. I just want to add a little thing. Don’t forget about Afghanistan, about the women of Afghanistan, stay with them, talk about them, remember them, and what’s going on there. They have lost their rights.”

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