Arquivo

Mr. Shi is an older Chinese man who comes to a barren American suburb to visit his daughter, Yilan, recently divorced and consumed by her work as a librarian. She is impatient with his presence, and it gradually leaks out that she is seeing a married man on the sly. Meanwhile, her father strikes up a friendship with an Iranian woman of his own age, a connection which inspires him to reconcile with his daughter. Wayne’s vision of America as an alienating, unfriendly place of almost agoraphobic spaces between houses and people is compelling and allows much of the film’s emotional life to remain unspoken.