Broadway performers Lea Salonga and Eva Noblezada co-star in Diane Paragas' heartfelt debut feature about an undocumented family's struggle to stay together despite the intervention of immigration authorities.
Fifteen years in development, writer-director Diane Paragas’ Yellow Rose arrives at a fraught point in the national immigration debate with its Texas-set story of an undocumented Filipina single mother and her teenage daughter struggling to remain in the U.S. Expanding on her 2017 short film, Paragas offers a clear-eyed, heartfelt interpretation of a classic American story that's graciously inclusive and even a bit provocative in its assertion of individual and artistic independence. The film recently won juried narrative feature awards at both the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and the Center for Asian American Media's CAAMFest.
Miss Saigon Tony Award winner Lea Salonga's name may be the most prominent in the cast, but rising star Eva Noblezada also earned a Tony nomination for her performance in the Broadway revival of the period musical, in the role originated by Salonga. Here Noblezada plays 17-year-old Rose Garcia, who lives at a tatty roadside motel on the outskirts of Austin, where her mother, Priscilla (Princess Punzalan), has worked cleaning rooms since the two arrived from the Philippines years earlier.
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