Film Pick of the Week: A Million Miles Away - review by Yvette Huddleston

The film opens in the late 1960s as young José (Juan Pablo Monterrubio) and his migrant farmworker family travel back and forth between their home in Mexico and California where they do seasonal agricultural work. This is the necessary pattern of their lives but for José and his siblings it is a disruption to their schooling. José is a bright, intelligent and curious child who is clearly very gifted at maths. He is fascinated by the stars and watches the Apollo 11 moon landings with great interest. One of his teachers recognises his talent, supporting his studying and even trying to persuade his parents to change their lifestyle.

Flash forward several years and José (now played by Michael Peña) has graduated from university, much to his parents’ great pride, and is working as a research engineer yet still helping out his family in the Californian fields which is where he first spots Adela (Rose Salazar). She too is from a Mexican family and assists her father with the agricultural work alongside her job as a sales manager at a second-hand car dealership. They begin a tentative courtship and when Adela asks José what his dream is – he tells her he wants to be an astronaut. She laughs, until she realises he is serious. Adela is bright, funny and capable, she also has a dream – to open her own restaurant serving authentic Mexican food – but that goes on the back burner as they start and raise their family of five children.

In the meantime, José is making slow but steady progress in his career. It is not easy – barriers are put in his way and he constantly has to deal with racist attitudes. On his first day at the Livermore Laboratory, he is mistaken by the receptionist for the janitor and given the cold-shoulder by most of his colleagues until he makes a breakthrough discovery in their research and they begin to take him seriously. All the while he is making annual applications to NASA’s astronaut training programme and every year he is rejected – 11 times in all. Until finally he is taken on and eventually becomes an engineer on the International Space Station. It is an inspiring, uplifting story which in a clear-eyed, unsentimental way, has a lot to say about staying true to yourself and following your dreams.