With immigration being a vastly different experience across race, gender, and origin country, it can be easy to dismiss Amazon Prime’s Expats as just another melodrama about the rich, especially with the controversies surrounding its production. There’s some truth to this– two of the three leads live in glamorous, high-rise apartments bigger and more expensive than the standard Hong Kong shoe-box– but the show is much more than that. It grapples with the identity that must be remade for the move. It empathizes with the unresolved loss that haunts the day-to-day life of both mother and caretaker. And on top of that, Lulu Wang portrays how this grief-stained lens can still be short-sighted, when directed to those in the margins. Expats is a revelation with its slow and steady multi-sided portraiture.
Genre: Drama
Actor: Brian Tee, Jack Huston, Ji-young Yoo, Nicole Kidman, Ruby Ruiz, Sarayu Blue