FROZEN RIVER

Melissa Leo was nominated for Best Actress for her role as Ray, a single mom raising two sons and barely getting by. They live in a small town on the New York/Quebec border, which is a Mohawk Reservation. Her husband has abandoned her and her sons, and she struggles to provide for them with her meager paycheck from her part time job at the Yankee Dollar Store. They are so impoverished that their meals consist of popcorn and Tang.

Ray meets up with a Lila, a Mohawk woman, also a single mother. Lila introduces Ray to a little known crossing area over the frozen St. Lawrence River on Mohawk territory. There, Lila has a contact that pays her for illegally smuggling immigrants into the US. The first time, Ray is tricked into doing it. But once she sees how easy it is to make a lot of money, and considers that her boys needs food and even Christmas presents, she goes back for more. She also needs money to pay off the double-wide trailer that they'd been saving for, since her wayward husband left with the money. She just wants to be able to pay that off before she loses it, and then she will walk away from smuggling. But how long can she push her luck?

While neither woman exhibit a lot of emotion about their situation, we see the pain and fear that they hold inside. We also feel so much compassion for Ray's two boys. The younger boy is oblivious about needing money, but the teenager takes on a lot of responsibility to take care of his brother. FROZEN RIVER won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008. It was a a great movie, slow moving at times, but still, a well-told and sad story.