Take Out - A film by Sean Baker & Shih-Ching Tsou
Authentic, suspenseful, funny, and alive with surprising detail, Shih-Ching Tsou and Sean Bakers Take Out reveals an unseen world of illegal Chinese immigrants at work in New York City. A day in the life of Ming Ding (Charles Jang) begins as a pair of hammer-wielding loan sharks come to the door of Mings squalid apartment. Their ultimatum is as simple as it is virtually impossible to fulfill: You give us $800 tonight, or your debt is doubled. With the family he supports half a world away, Ming has a single rain-soaked shift at his job -- anonymously and almost wordlessly delivering Chinese food on Manhattans Upper West Side -- in which to pay off his thuggish creditors. Deftly combining professionals and non-actors with ingenious DV photography, Take Out intelligently illuminates an immigrant underdog and his small community of harried co-workers with the same in-the-moment, pragmatic honesty with which Ming endures the constant deprivations of life on the American margin.
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2008,
USA,
Languages: English and Chinese
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87 min.
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