Antonio Leblanc: Last News

Justin Chon seeks to create conversation and awareness around the complex and sobering realities of immigration in the United States with his Blue Bayou.

is a melodrama that lives in the black and whites of life, in the cut and dried institutions that would put a devoted family man, adopted and brought to the States as a small child, in danger of being deported from the only home he's ever known.Writer-director Justin Chon stars as Antonio LeBlanc, a Korean adoptee raised in the Louisiana bayou, laboring to make a better life for his pregnant wife, Kathy (Alicia Vikander), and stepdaughter, Jessie (Sydney Kowalske). But when the sins of his past and an unjust police culture land him on the wrong side of ICE, Antonio's Americanness is called into question, no matter that he had no say in his coming here or that he is currently married to a citizen.

Guy Lodge Film CriticTo New Orleans family man Antonio LeBlanc (Justin Chon) and everyone close to him, he’s as American as the tattooed eagle spreading its wings defiantly across his throat, down to his lived-in Southern drawl acquired over more than three decades. To ICE authorities, however, he’s nothing more than a Korean immigrant with a criminal record and faulty paperwork, and they want him out.Never mind that he has scarcely any memories of his motherland, having been brought out to the U.S.

When the immigration system threatens to tear one family apart, a father will do anything.

Filmmaker and actor Justin Chon's Blue Bayou is getting a high-profile 2021 summer release in theaters, Focus Features announced Friday. The drama, a timely story about an American family fighting for their future as the father faces deportation, will hit the big screen in the U.S.

Matt Donnelly Senior Film WriterThe latest project from acclaimed independent filmmaker Justin Chon, “Blue Bayou,” has been acquired by Focus Features, Variety can report exclusively.The studio brokered a worldwide deal for the film’s distribution rights out of the Cannes 2020 virtual market, which was financed by MARCO and Entertainment One.