Review of Fremont, directed by Babak Jalali

As I came back from Malaysia in January 2024, there were a solid few days that I had to do nothing before I headed back to my final semester of graduate school. And man, despite being jet lagged, I relished that time I had to just sit around, watch movies, and rot. It’s truly a privilege, that’s for sure.

During that time I was very specifically catching up on my MUBI backlog, as there were a ton of movies I knew I wanted to watch on the platform, but hadn’t had the chance to actually watch because of how I was traveling so much and going to school and work.

Fremont had just been added at this time, and had appeared on my front page.

I was drawn into this movie specifically in how it centers an immigrant woman’s experience, especially an Afghan. We don’t get that a lot in mainstream movies, so I appreciate these movies when they do make it into a place where they can have wider visibility.

Let’s get into the review!

Donya, a former translator for the US army, struggles with her life life in the States.

Our main character is Donya, an Afghan translator who left behind her life in Afghanistan and now lives in Fremont, California. She’s been in the United States for only eight months now, but is not only struggling with starting a new life there, but with loneliness and insomnia as well.

She works at a fortune cookie factory in San Francisco, which she commutes to, and she likes (platonically) the male owner of the factory. He’s nice to the employees and her, but his wife, Lin, is much colder towards Donya. So she spends her days packaging the cookies, then going home to her room.

Regardless, she doesn’t have much social interaction. She frequents a Middle Eastern restaurant and spends time talking to the owner, but besides that she only talks to her coworkers and neighbors. One of them, Salim, is a refugee like her. They’re both waiting to be able to talk to a therapist.

Turns out both have insomnia, and in one scene, he offers her a coffee, which she declines on the basis that it would ruin her sleep even more. But when he gets a therapist appointment, he gives it to Donya, who shows up and is then promptly annoyed at the fact she can’t get prescription pills immediately.

One of her coworkers then dies, and Donya has to write the fortunes now. Because Donya isn’t very happy, they don’t come out well, and they’re not chipper fortunes. She continues going to therapy, and we learn her insomnia stems from survivor’s guilt, as she left behind her family and friends in Afghanistan to come to the US.

We also learn Donya was one of three translators on the base, and the only one who made it out. She left Afghanistan went her family started getting death threats for her occupation. The restaurant owner, after seeing how she is, tells her that she needs to start dating soon, which she admits to her neighbor she wants someone romantically.

However, she thinks it’s unfair for her to have joy when people back home are suffering. But Donya has a change of heart, and she writers her phone number down in a fortune cookie. Lin wants to fire her after hearing about it, but her husband wants to keep her.

But one day, Donya gets a text from a pottery shop. She drives to Bakersfield to meet the person, and she thinks it’s from the fortune cookie. Along the way, she stops at an auto shop, where she meets a man named Daniel. The two of them have some chemistry, but Donya rejects him.

She heads to the pottery shop, and is then handed a deer statue. Lin gave him Donya’s number to pick up the statue, so it wasn’t from the fortune cookie. Donya returns to the auto shop, gives Daniel the statue, and then they share a cup of coffee.

Overall Thoughts

This was such a lovely little film. Donya is a character clearly haunted by her past, and I think we can see some deeper conversations about the impacts of trauma and how it bleeds into every aspect of our lives by watching this.

I’m such a sucker for movies that are shot in black and white, and I think Fremont is gorgeous to watch because of this. I know some people who cannot watch a black and white movie at all, but it’s so difficult to pull off this form of filming. This movie does an excellent job with it, if we’re going to be honest.

All in all, I’m really glad I had the opportunity to watch this movie before I cut off my MUBI subscription a few months later. It was worth it!

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