My Heavenly City (2023)

This is quite a telling story of optimism and realism that tangentially ties up three short stories of Taiwanese people who live in New York and discover that the grass isn't always greenest. The first sees a young bi-lingual woman who gets agency work helping local authorities deal with clients with little or no English. A range of brief scenarios ensue that make her realise, especially the final encounter with a young homeless man, that day to day life can be tough. Meantime, a young, aspiring and naive hip-hop dancer gets pretty much robbed on the street before he meets a likeminded girl and together, through their love of bopping about, gradually fall in love before she must return home. On a tube journey they find a small green notebook that belonged to our first storyteller and that introduces us to our final family who are struggling to come to terms with their young, violent, son who clearly has mental health issues that the father, especially, is having difficulty coming to terms with. Might the solution lie with a kite? Well that's how we start, a kite that flies over the park in which all of our visitors are sitting. As a non-American, I also felt that I, too, could be one of those visitors and the style of direction from Sen-I Yu offers us a fly-on-the-wall glimpse at how people arrive and settle into to a different society - sometimes craving that which they have left behind, sometimes just as equally desperate to avoid those very cravings. The first episode also identifies just how hard integration can be when language is not common, too. The acting is all fine, it's a bit over-written at times but the sentiment and variety on offer here is measured, occasionally quite poignant and worth a watch.