LEARNING TO BREATH

Choking Man

In Steve Barron’s Choking Man, an ultra-low budget production about urban alienation and immigrant despair, griminess is a form of solace. As the soft-spoken protagonist, an Ecuadorian kitchen worker named Jorge (Octavio Gómez), slowly wastes away washing dishes in a Queens diner, the leftovers from patrons’ plates dominate his field of vision and catalyze his daydreams. Barron uses bright yellow animations to represent Jorge’s avoidance of his mundane reality, a dreary world of brown and grey tones where his own presence never feels quite solid. Language and timidity are his primary foes. His vindication comes from abstractions.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...