Here's a modern-day film noir in which you're never sure what's real and what isn't real. There is a possibility you may get tired of guessing and give up on this film 34ths of the way through, as I almost did but it worth finishing. It also was better the second time around The problem is just too many flashbacks. If some of those scenes were not replayed so often, or a few of the many twists eliminated, it would have been a super movie. It still was fascinating in parts. It grabs you, and you can't stop watching to see what the real story is. Along the way, is a bunch of nice colors and some nice film noir-type in the beginning and then during the ending credits.
In this powerful documentary, Mama Yang, an 84-year-old woman living in New York, finds herself in correspondence with 45 high security prison inmates she views as her own children. Most are Chinese American immigrants, and see in Mama Yang a mother figure they never knew before they stepped through prison walls.
For Mama Yang though, the story is about more than Christian charity. She had already lived a full life in Taiwan when her husband died at age sixty and her son lost their house in a financial blunder. She moved to the US to start anew and lives with a Taiwanese American granddaughter that remains distant. In a film marked by family separations, Mama Yang writes letters – whether to the incarcerated or to her own granddaughter – to heal lifetimes of wounds.