To the outside world Joanne is just a book-store owner, but the Conspiracy knows different. She's dangerous. She's a bellwether a quiet leader who is well on her way to being her whole self. When they kidnap her to break her to make her conform, they discover that Joanne is something so much more than even she ever knew. Joanne is a feminist, one-room, one-character elevated genre thriller. It is a modern rite of passage story which most women have to go through to become a whole human being How does one be oneself in the face of massive misogyny and hatred (both overt and institutionalized). It is also the world's first one-person film (a movie with only one on-screen character) that features a woman.
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.