The movie is a throwback to a time when ordinary people enjoyed simple pleasures like going to their club, or taking in the pictures and growing their chrysanthemums in the adjoining greenhouse garden...so very British.
It is these very ordinary people that some artists have a great sympathy and admiration for in our often self-serving world. Nothing extraordinary about the movie or the couple but almost 60 years on, the acting still makes it a delight to watch.
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.