The first 15 minutes of East Side Sushi are utterly transfixing. Juana, a single mother, wakes at 4 a.m. and cooks breakfast for her father. In the dark, she slides her still-sleeping daughter, Lydia, into a school uniform. Juana carries her daughter to the wholesale fruit market and then to an industrial kitchen where, while Lydia sleeps in a folding chair, she and her father slice mango, watermelon, and pineapple to sell on the streets of Oakland. Lydia gets dropped off at school, and then her mother and grandfather go to work, her manning the fruit cart and him stocking shelves at an army/navy surplus store. At the end of the day, Juana is assaulted and robbed at gunpoint of her day’s earnings. Her father can’t pick her up because his truck has broken down.
Shot in the hazy, glowing light particular to both dawn and dusk, director Anthony Lucero shows us exactly what it means to be poor in America. These first scenes are the best elements of a very good, if uneven, film…
