Bitterroot

Distributed by Icarus Films, 32 Court St., 21st Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11201; 800-876-1710Produced by Vera Brunner-SungDirected by Vera Brunner-Sung2024, Streaming, 85 mins Bitterroot the edible and culturally significant Lewisia Rediviva is the state flower of Montana. It is also a particularly beautiful and agriculturally productive region of western Montana. The flower is semantically representative of the difficult emotional and psychological experiences faced by Lue, the central character of Vera Brunner-Sung's family drama. The film depicts a family of Hmong-Americans and the experiences of bridging modern and traditional life among multicultural immigrant communities. Lue is a recently divorced man living with his elderly mother. He works a maintenance job at the local university, and he and his mother sell their garden produce at a farmer’s market. While Lue is assimilated into his American culture, his mother, a refugee to the United States, is much more connected to their Hmong roots both culturally and religiously. She worries about her son who has brooded and remained withdrawn since his wife left him after a miscarried pregnancy. Her supplications to the spirit of her deceased husband and to the local Hmong Shaman are looked upon with disdain by Lue, who finds solace only in his solitary fly-fishing trips and karaoke singing, by himself, at a local bar. Lue is a man of few words. In fact, we hear Lue sing a song of lost love at karaoke (Every time you go away, by Paul Young, (1985)) before we ever hear him speak. The first words of dialog we get from Lue don’t emerge for ten minutes into the film, and the first spoken audio we hear in the film is in Hmong from an “auntie” of the family encouraging Lue to meet her eligible cousin. Thus, Bitterroot’s writer-director Brunner-Sung establishes the tensions in the film between Lue’s status as a single divorced man and his ethnic culture and familial pressure to remarry. When Lue loses his job at the university due to budget cuts, he struggles to find additional work and hides the news from his mother. These narrative threads, Lue’s journey, and his relationship to his family and his traditional culture, wind their way through tension, climax and denouement to a quiet yet fulfilling resolution in which Lue is able to reconcile his resistance to Hmong culture and move forward in his life post-divorce. The film will resonate with students of Asian-American studies, Family studies, Aging studies and Social Work. However, since Bitterroot is a drama, it serves as an example of a multicultural experience more than an informational, educational piece. Recommended for university curricula related to the Asian-American experience. Awards:Special Jury Mention, Tribeca Film Festival; Jury Prize, Film Fest Knox