Foreign Letters

Product Description Ellie, a 12-year-old immigrant girl from Israel, is lonely and homesick. Life brightens when she meets Thuy, a Vietnamese refugee her age. Trust slowly builds as the two teach each other about life in America. As Ellie and Thuy become inseparable, they eventually hurt and betray each other. Ellie must give up her most prized possession, in order to save their friendship. Based on the filmmaker's own experience, Foreign Letters is a story about prejudice, poverty, shame, and the power of friendship to heal us. The film features the music of iconic Israeli musician Chava Alberstein, who was the director's favorite musician when her family immigrated to the US in 1982. About the Director Ela Thier s three feature film credits to date are: FOREIGN LETTERS (writer-director-producer), a dramedy about her personal immigration story, to be released in 2012. PUNCTURE (story-by, co-producer), a film starring Chris Evans (Fantastic Four, Captain America), which premiered at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival. and THE WEDDING COW (writer), which won eighteen international awards, including four Best Feature and four Audience Choice awards. Thier has written and directed over a dozen short films. Among them: A SUMMER RAIN (writer-director-producer), on which FOREIGN LETTERS is based on, which won numerous Best Short awards and screened at over 200 film festivals and venues. Prior to that she made GENTLE CYCLE ONLY (director), won Brightest Emerging Director at The View From Here Film Festival, and JUDO GIRL (writer-director-producer), produced by Fluidfilm. A prolific writer, Thier's scripts were selected four times by the Independent Film Week (formerly IFP Market). Among numerous recognitions, she was awarded a fellowship grant in screenwriting from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), and was nominated for the White House Project Emerging Artist Award in 2010. In 2006 Thier began teaching screenwriting with a class of eight participants. Since then, as word spread, over two thousand working and aspiring filmmakers have attended her writing and directing workshops. She also teaches writing-directing seminars at the School of Visual Arts, and has played a variety of roles in her students' film projects. A partial list of credits is listed on IMDB and her reel can be viewed at ElaThier.com.