Frozen River

When she gets up one morning just before Christmas, Ray discovers that she is a single mother. Her husband, a gambling addict and Mohican Indian, has run off with the down-payment on their new mobile home. Ray sends the children to school and says that she is not even going to go and look for her husband. But she does anyway.
In the Mohican reservation, she finds his car just as it’s being stolen by the Mohican Lila Littlewolf, but she doesn’t find her husband. Ray is all on her own and a new mobile home seems impossibly distant. A strange twist of fate is that Lila, the car thief, offers a solution. Ray and Lila can smuggle illegal immigrants over the river between Canada and the United States. The loopholes in the law of the reservation are big enough for that, even though it’s not without risk.
Frozen River is effective thanks to its grim social realism, but the power of the film is in the casting of the actress Melissa Leo, who plays a stubborn woman branded by life. When she shoots a hole in Littlewolf’s mobile home, she’s just as convincing as when she serves popcorn for breakfast. The film won the prestigious Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. (GjZ)

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