Aisha

Letitia Wright gives a quietly powerful performance in “Aisha” as a young Nigerian woman seeking asylum in Ireland and struggling to overcome one bureaucratic obstacle after another. 

Writer-director Frank Berry’s film never devolves into melodrama – if anything, it may be understated to a fault – but he grounds her plight in an authentic mixture of daily frustrations and sporadic joys. The absurdism of the consistent hardships she endures is maddening: An administrator at the accommodation center where she lives won’t hand her an important piece of mail she needs, so she misses the bus to her part-time job at a hair salon, where the owner scolds her for her tardiness. It’s that sort of thing, day in and day out. She just can’t seem to catch a break. There’s racism behind some of these roadblocks, as well as a certain sadism. To borrow a phrase that’s been used repeatedly in recent years to describe the treatment of immigrants to America, the cruelty is the point.