AIFF on the Small Screen: Lake Los Angeles
Lake Los Angeles
Feature | 85 minutes | 2014 | Director(s): Mike Ott | USA | AIFF2015
Francisco, a middle-aged Cuban exile, looks after undocumented immigrants at a cabin hidden in the California desert. He forges a tentative father-daughter relationship with Cecilia, a 10-year-old Mexican girl who has crossed the border alone in search of a father she has never met. When all hope of being reconnected with him fails, and she is under threat from her “coyote,” Cecilia runs away deeper into the desert. She turns the wind-scrubbed wasteland into a fantastical world and creates characters and stories that make the hopelessness of the empty landscape survivable. Traversing what was meant to be their promised land, Francisco and Cecilia find hope and redemption in each other in this hauntingly beautiful and desolate world.