Professor Yehuda Sharim’s latest documentary, “ Letters2Maybe,” has opened to glowing reviews at the New Jersey Film Festival.
The film is based on events and dreams that took place in Houston and Merced from 2015 to 2020 and offers an intimate portrayal of those who refuse to surrender amidst daily devastation and culminating strife. It offers a vision for equality and a renewed sense of solidarity in a divisive country.
The publication The New Jersey Stage tells its readers about the film’s basic premise: Immigrants in Merced and Houston speak in an open letter to someone, addressing important challenges such as what it means to no longer have access to their homelands; and whether community is enough to support and console people when they face injustice.
“These moments, when the film’s subjects are so scorchingly honest and vulnerable, simply take your breath away,” critic Hannah Vliet wrote in her review . “Sharim is able to harvest these instances of poetry, the poetry of human testimony, and string them together with precision.”
Reviewer Capri Leone called the film “inspirational,” with an important story to tell.
“Letters2Maybe” also opens in Houston at the Iranian Film Festival this month, and will screen in Puebla, Mexico, in March; in Nice, France, in April; in Mainz and Wuppertal, Germany, Seoul and Vienna in May; and in Chicago and Monterey, Mexico, in June.
Sharim is with the Department of Global Arts Studies. His studio has made five feature-length films — “Letters2Maybe,” “We Are in It,” “Lessons in Seeing,” “Seeds of All Things” and “Songs That Never End” — as well as a short film entitled “Red Line Lullaby,” which chronicles the lives of working women as they seek a more dignified life in the face of neglect, loss and daily acts of resistance.
