Blue Bayou (2021) on Netflix
Antonio LeBlanc, a Korean-American adoptee, lives near New Orleans with Kathy, his pregnant wife, and her daughter Jessie. An arrest puts him in immigration custody, and he faces deportation.
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- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.1/1011,922 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes75%
Trailer
Plot summary
Antonio LeBlanc works as a tattoo artist outside New Orleans. He is a Korean-American adoptee, and he lives with his wife Kathy, who is pregnant, and her daughter Jessie. His criminal record keeps him from finding additional work to support the family, and Kathy offers to return to work. After police officers Ace and Denny physically harass him, he is arrested. Immigration and Customs Enforcement takes him into custody, and he faces deportation: his adoptive parents never naturalized him, and the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 does not cover anyone who turned 18 before it passed. Kathy and Antonio hire immigration lawyer Barry Boucher, who asks for a $5,000 retainer and warns that a failed appeal would mean Antonio could never re-enter the country.
Cast
- Toby Vitranoas Merk
- Truong Quang Tranas Quoc
- Ivy Vy Leas Nicole
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Blue Bayou (2021)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film grew out of a real gap in American law. The Child Citizenship Act of 2000 made every child adopted from abroad a citizen, but it left out anyone who had already turned 18, stranding a generation of Asian-American adoptees without papers.
- Justin Chon spent four years on the film and hundreds of hours on the telephone with five adoptees who read his drafts, then screened his edits for them and kept changing the cut in post-production until they were comfortable with it.
- Parts of the international Korean adoptee community called for a boycott, saying the film used adoptee stories without consent, and objected to a promotion offering a VIP trip to the place where the film's traumatic events are set. Focus Features withdrew that giveaway.
- Answering the accusations, Justin Chon said he had worked with 13 adoptees on the film and that it had never been meant to reflect the details of any single person's life.
