By Murtada Elfadl
Memory is a tricky beast. Often what we remember or what we try to forget rules our emotional lives. Immigrants, who leave behind people they love and places they cherished, feel this acutely. As time goes by, memories fragment and become foggy and what's left is the heartache that won't go away and the joy remembered.
In recent editions of the Sundance Film Festival, we saw that combination of heartache and joy crystalized into a few films about immigrants. These are stories about maintaining family while forging lives in new places. The immigrant families in these movies come from different places - China, Korea, Angola and Mexico respectively - yet the filmmakers are telling wholly American stories inspired by their families and memories.
They are a set of new American classics with stories mired in the current geopolitical conflicts that have created the modern diaspora. Their scale might be small, but they are epic in their emotional honesty. These films present searing sagas about family and home. Reminiscent of similar sagas from the golden age of Hollywood.
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