A vivid love let­ter to the 1980s and one woman’s strug­gle to over­come the chal­lenges of immi­gra­tion. It’s 1986, and Muna Hed­dad is in a bind. She and her son have moved to Mon­tre­al, leav­ing behind a civ­il war filled with bad mem­o­ries in Lebanon. She had plans to find work as a French teacher, but no one in Que­bec trusts her to teach the lan­guage. She needs to start mak­ing mon­ey, and fast. The only work Muna can find is at a weight-loss cen­ter as a hot­line oper­a­tor. All day, she takes calls from peo­ple respond­ing to ads seen in mag­a­zines or on TV. On the phone, she’s Mona, and she’s quite good at lis­ten­ing. These strangers all have so much to say once some­one shows inter­est in their lives – mar­riages gone bad, par­ents dying, iso­la­tion, per­son­al inad­e­qua­cies. Even as her dai­ly life in Cana­da is filled with invis­i­ble bar­ri­ers at every turn, at the office Muna is privy to her clients’ deep­est secrets. Fol­low­ing inter­na­tion­al acclaim for Niko (2011) and The Bleeds (2018), Dim­itri Nas­ral­lah has writ­ten a vivid ele­gy to the 1980s, the years he first moved to Cana­da, bring­ing the era’s sys­temic chal­lenges into the cur­rent moment through this deeply endear­ing por­trait of strug­gle, per­se­ver­ance, and bonding.