From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment, which you can also hear at KCRW.com.

There's been a lot of talk about how Sundance was veryly disappointing or whatever this year,

but there were some remarkable films.

Among them, the film of my guest, Courtney Hartar, film, Frozen River, is really an unusual film.

And thanks much for being here, first of all.

It's great to be here.

Given it, it's a movie that doesn't have a conventional narrative thrust to it, I've got to put you in a position of having you tell the audience what the film is about. Well, the film is about two women who are down and out, one white, one

Mohawk, the white trailer mom and this young Mohawk girl who's a smuggler. And they team up

through a circumstance at the beginning to smuggle illegal immigrants across the Canadian border into New York State.

They do it by driving the car that they share across the frozen St. Lawrence River.

It's about a mile wide.

This is based on a real-life situation.

This does go on there, but 100 illegals come in a week they estimate in this way. And this is what these two women are doing

to survive to support their kids. And what's fascinating to me about the film is that at the outset,

it feels like yet another Sundance film about a family in transition, more agonizing re-abraisal,

what's going to happen next? But wait, no, it's

not that. I mean, I wonder if you had some fun and sort of like toying with people's expectations

about what a film with a single mom is going to be, and just adding very subtly, almost insidiously,

in fact, these tensions that make it into a different movie all together. Well, you know, it's funny.

I was raised by a single mom, and I've said before, you know, sometimes it was just

an adventure to pay the rent.

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