Justin Chon’s fierce heartbreaker, written and starring himself, centres on a Korean-American whose family is threatened by racist government policy
America’s equivalent of the UK’s Windrush scandal is the driving force behind this fierce heartbreaker from Korean-American star Justin Chon, who played Erik in the Twilight saga and got his directing breakthrough in 2017 with Gook, a drama set around the 1992 LA riots. Here, Chon writes, directs and stars as Antonio, who as a baby was given away for adoption by his
immigrant Korean mother and brought up by negligent white parents. After a troubled past and spells in jail for stealing motorbikes, Antonio has turned his life around, working as a tattoo artist in New Orleans and married to a physical therapist, Kathy, played by Alicia Vikander – who, with no dubbing, sings a very nice karaoke version of Roy Orbison’s song about the beautiful Louisiana wetlands that give the film its title.
Antonio is a loving stepdad to Kathy’s daughter Jessie (Sydney Kowalske) and together, they’ve got another baby on the way. But Jessie’s absentee dad is a cop, Ace (Mark O’Brien), who with aggressive self-pity now bitterly regrets leaving his child to be parented by another man and is demanding parental access rights; influenced by his racist cop partner Denny (Emory Cohen) it dawns on him that in the US, adopted people of immigrant descent without paperwork have no guaranteed residency. He can get Antonio deported. Meanwhile, Antonio and Kathy befriend Vietnamese-American Parker (Linh-Dan Pham), who has her own sadness.