SYNOPSICS
Foreign Letters (2012) is a English,Hebrew,Vietnamese movie. Ela Thier has directed this movie. Noa Rotstein,Dalena Le,Ela Thier,Udi Razzin are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2012. Foreign Letters (2012) is considered one of the best Comedy,Drama movie in India and around the world.
A bittersweet coming-of-age film, Foreign Letters is itself a love letter to the unshakeable bond between friends. Set in the pre-email era of the 1980s, young Ellie, newly arrived to the US from Israel, anxiously waits for letters from her best friend back home. Suffering from homesickness, language difficulties and rejection at school, life brightens when she meets Thuy, a Vietnamese refugee her age. As the two bond and become inseparable, they eventually hurt each other, and Ellie must find a way to restore their trust. Based on director Ela Thier's personal immigration experience, Foreign Letters is a film about poverty, prejudice, shame, and the healing power of friendship.
More
Foreign Letters (2012) Reviews
Great "from the heart" film
The lessons learned from childhood friendships apply to friendships between adults. In this simple yet profound story are thought provoking issues about expectations, disappointment, and forgiveness. It's also about alienation, loneliness and the difficulty of assimilation. This is the kind of film that stays with you long after you've seen it. There are no special effects, no sex, no violence and yet there wasn't one moment where I wasn't fully involved and totally absorbed. I know the acting was good because there wasn't one second that I was aware that they were acting. This is an excellent movie to watch with children or grandchildren.
A simple, honest film about friendship.
Word for word this movie described my life. I couldn't wait for it to be over so I could write a review. It felt more like a documentary than a fictional story, probably because the producer wrote from experience, but how she captured every second of that time is beautiful. 30 minutes in felt like hours because of the details of every moment. We see the world, but also how Ellie sees it alongside it. The film is well paced and the narrative choice is brilliant. In other words, it's effortless. I feel the movie was straight from the heart and moved along naturally with nostalgia rather than pain for her childhood. It is a movie set in reality rather than fantasy. Blah blah blah, just see it. It's good.
Powerful Message About Friendship
The film is written and directed by Ela Their, who also has a major role in the movie. It is apparently a true story based on her experiences when she was 12 years old, after she and her family emigrated to the United states from Israel, in the early 1980's. Noa Rotstein portrays Ellie, who as mentioned above has come to the United States, from Israel, with her parents and her younger brother. They have settled in Connecticut where Ellie will attend 6th grade although she barely speaks any English. She feels very isolated, as a result of the language barrier and must contend with one mean girl in particular who asks her one day if "all girls in Israel are ugly". While beginning to learn English both inside and outside school she continues to correspond with her best friend Shlomit, who is still in Israel. These letters can be quite delightful and humorous. Eating alone in school every day she sees another girl, who's in her class, but is also very isolated and quiet. She gets up enough courage to introduce herself to her and finds out her name is Thuy. Thuy, who is portrayed by Dalena Le, had emigrated to America with her family two years before, from Vietnam, and has learned a great deal of English since then. The film centers on the relationship between Ellie and Thuy as they become best of friends. There are many touching, funny, and enjoyable scenes between the two but since they are hesitant about many aspects of their friendship some scenes can be difficult to watch as they are marked by painful and awkward silences. The two disparate cultures they come from has a lot to do with this. Finally, there is friction between the two friends and a break-up. Will they be able to reconcile? I'll leave that to the viewer. Let's just say there is a powerful message to be told about friendship in the film. The actual photos of the two girls in the 1980's then their reunions some 30 years later were also striking and greatly enhanced the film.
Left Unsatisfied :(
I both liked and disliked this movie and I'll explain why. When I read the summary on Netflix, I was looking forward to it. I thought it would be as I imagined it and also hoped it would be as I was hoping for. I've always wanted to have a friend with a different ethnicity as mine, but only in my dreams because in my experiences, "friendship" comes and goes. I never had such luck. So, I thought this movie was going to be like this, and I was pleased when they met. But as the movie progressed, I find it strange how the two still acted so shy and Ellie seemed too pushy towards Thuy. And Thuy reminded me of a "friend" I had who always lied to me for no reason. So this movie ended up confusing me as to how did they still remained friends and reunite??? This movie isn't what I hoped it would be and left me unsatisfied at the end, but there are some parts to this film I do like. That they show no boundaries in race. I wish the world was really like that. I marked this as a spoiler in case you haven't seen the movie yet. But I do recommend you see it. It is a bittersweet movie.
Not much better than just OK
After watching the first few minutes of this film, I was quite encouraged that it would turn out to be quite interesting and entertaining. Unfortunately, I turned out to be wrong. The film seems to cover a very short period of time. It begins in summer (judging by how people are dressed) and ends in summer, all while school is in session. It is basically, the story of a young (12-year-old) Israeli girl who moves to the US. She learns to speak English over the course of the film. She does not seem to change very much (other than learning to speak English) in the story. The story is, as the summaries explain, the friendship between two non-native American girls in an American school. I didn't feel there was anything particularly interesting about their story, or that it was told in a particularly interesting way. The promise of the first few minutes was, for me, never fulfilled.