Marlo Poras’s remarkable documentary, which won the Audience Award at South by Southwest and played at this year’s P-Town Film Fest and on PBS’s P.O.V., is among the best local films of the new century, a heartbreaking tale of one year in the life of a Vietnamese exchange student in America. Poras discovered Mai in Communist Hanoi and followed this effervescent, winningly optimistic girl back to the USA, where, expecting paradise, she got bogged down in rural Mississippi with a white-trash, TV-glued family of depressives. Thank Buddha for her surprise friends, a left-liberal history teacher and this Bible Belt town’s sole giddy transvestite. (video/72 minutes)