Mai's America

MAI'S AMERICA

This documentary about an awkward but resilient young Vietnamese woman who moves from Hanoi to small-town Mississippi as an exchange student is intimately fixated on its subject. Homesick and often baffled by the low-rent Southern culture she now occupies, Mai nonetheless tries to get into an American university while befriending a swishy transvestite and conferring with an eerily accurate palm reader. The riveting, tiny episodes of Mai's American life ultimately become a quite majestic, beautiful, and tragic film. (CC, 3/8, 8:45pm; Paramount, 3/11, 11:30am; Paramount, 3/13, 1:30pm) -- Clay Smith