This veteran actor plays an immigration lawyer in a new movie. In real life he’s fighting his own case

 

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A lawyer stares across his desk and gives his client a dire warning.

“You have a month to find someone to cosign your visa,” he says. “If you don’t, you have to leave the US.”

It’s another bleak day at Khalil Immigration Law, where people losing their cases vanish into thin air, and even a gold plaque on the waiting room wall promises to make no promises, featuring a motto that tepidly declares, “We’ll do what we can!”

If that sounds absurd, it should. The law office is one of many deliberately strange places viewers of the new film “Problemista” will see as they follow protagonist Alejandro’s desperate quest to stay in the United States and achieve his dreams.

In this scene early in the movie, which stars writer-director Julio Torres and released in theaters nationwide Friday, Mr. Khalil is pushing Torres’ Alejandro to come up with a solution — and fast. Could a woman Alejandro has just met become his sponsor?

“I mean, we’ll see,” Alejandro says with a shrug.

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Khalil, played by Laith Nakli, perks up and races to scribble on his notepad. Has the lawyer come up with an exciting new legal strategy or an idea that cracks the case? Not at all.

“We’ll see,” Khalil repeats with a smile, sweeping his hand through the air as he envisions the phrase on a new waiting room plaque. “That’s a much better motto for us.”

It’s one of the many humorous moments punctuating “Problemista,” a film that highlights the uncertainties of the US immigration system — and the surreal twists and turns faced by people trying to navigate it.

Alejandro pushes forward against the odds, and despite the crazed whims of a boss (art critic Elizabeth Asencio, played by Tilda Swinton) whose default setting is shouting and picking fights with everyone around her.

For Torres, it’s a fictional story — but a personal one, too.

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“I’ve been living with these feelings for so long. It just makes sense that they poured out in a movie,” he told CNN in a recent interview. The former “SNL” writer came to the US from El Salvador as a college student. And he can still remember the panic he felt when trying to land a job and switch from a student visa to a work visa after graduation. “I would wake up and my heart was already racing,” he says.

I’ve been living with these feelings for so long. It just makes sense that they poured out in a movie.

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