Immigrants tested in bleak ‘Lana’s Rain’

Eleven years ago, Time magazine’s “Flesh for Sale” cover story about Eastern European prostitutes inspired writer-director Michael S. Ojeda. “I thought, why not take characters from this region and have them come here for the American Dream, and have it not quite work out the way they planned,” he explains. The resulting movie, “Lana’s Rain,” opens Friday at Laemmle’s Fairfax Cinemas.

Shot on 16-millimeter film in Croatia and Chicago for about $215,000, the film tells a bleak immigrants’ tale about Lana (played by Ukrainian-born model Oksana Orlenko) and her larcenous half-brother Darko (Bulgarian actor Nickolai Stoilov), who smuggle themselves out of war-torn Croatia in a cargo container. Arriving in Chicago broke and unable to speak English, they turn to a life of crime grimy with tricks, beatings, stabbings, gunfights, car explosions and avenging agents from the Balkan war crimes tribunal.

“I wanted Lana to go deeper into a hellish abyss before she gets out,” says Ojeda. “Oksana has this innocence and childishness in real life, which you see in the beginning of the movie. Then she becomes this harder person in the middle, and evolves in the end as this strong, courageous woman.”

Though he took “Lana’s” premise from real events, Ojeda’s empathy for immigrant dislocation is informed by his own family history. Ojeda’s grandparents fled to America to escape the Holocaust. His father came to Chicago from Puerto Rico at age 14, sleeping in abandoned cars during the winter before a houseful of prostitutes took him in.

Ojeda also drew on his work experience as the cinematographer for a Chinese soap opera filmed in Chicago. “The cast was all Chinese and the crew was 90% Chinese, so we had to find a way to communicate. That sparked my interest in a project about people with a language barrier. At the same time, every day on the set we were reading articles about what was happening in Bosnia.

“But ‘Lana’s Rain’ is not really a political film. These characters could be from anywhere in the world. It’s about a young woman who finds herself completely isolated and lost in a foreign land, and who finally overcomes all that.”

-- Hugh Hart