It’s easy to go wrong with a fictional documentary about a white man saving a young woman of color. Real easy. So easy, in fact, that I’m pretty happy I don’t see such films very often.

Holly is different. No one, including the white man, Patrick (Ron Livingston), moralizes or apologizes except once, when he explains:

“Look, I know how it works alright? I walk by a 100 kids a day grabbing for handouts, fucking pushing bullshit souvenirs and I know you can’t help them, you can’t even try. You give them money, someone takes it…Then you develop this glazed-eye stare, you know? And you never stop. And then you’re fine. As long as you don’t look in their eyes you’re fine.”

And it’s pretty clear he’s uneasy that he did stop instead of continuing his live-and-let-survive gambling, boozing road trip to nowhere, Cambodia.

Holly (Thuy Nguyen), the 12-ish year-old girl he stops for in the infamous K11 prostitution village, doesn’t offer holy guidance or sit on a pedestal of corrupted innocence. She’s not a rosy-faced, wide-eyed little girl; she gets messed up, even if we never really see how deeply it goes. It’s part of the child/woman we have to accept her as, laced with cynical wit and steeped in stubbornness. She let her family in Vietnam sell her, after all, so they wouldn’t have to sell her little sister into back alley yumyums and boombooms.

For all the latent tragedy, however, Holly is surprisingly drama-free. We see Patrick, Holly and even Holly’s Mama San dealing and struggling with life — to uneven success and varying degrees of evil — not dramatizing cultural politics. There is a time and a place for that, but the strength of Holly is that it doesn’t go there.

The time and the place to check out Holly is next Friday, April 25th in NYC for the start of Holly’s limited run. E-mail TRACE here for your pair of tickets.

There are musicians in every city. Every block, every street and every community grows and pulses as music scenes merge and continue to build. It takes something special to break open the walls and pull together all types of personalities and gain an eclectic but die hard fan base. You must have the “it” factor.

The band Little Dragon entered my world as an accident. I stumbled on their myspace page a few months ago, and found myself returning every couple of days for a fix of their amazing sound. The singer, Yukimi Nagano has a voice that soothes the soul while tickling the eardrums. The band, tightly knit and visually intriguing, deliver songs that reach deep into your bones and beg you to be present.

Although they have not yet made it to NYC to play, they have been doing tons of shows everywhere from California to Sweden, where they are based. Yukimi gave me scoop on what’s behind the group and what drives the force…Fall in love here.

TRACE: How did Little Dragon come together to become the masterpiece it is growing into?

Yukimi: We met in highschool and have been doing music since forever it feels like! The name Little Dragon came about later when we realized we needed a name 4 years ago.

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Drawings coming out of nowhere; evanescent female figures with flowers blooming out of their eyes or mouth. That’s Noumeda Carbone’s world. Her art reveals her personal path, a crossroad composed of many sources.

Raised in France from an Indian-French mother and an Italian father, Noumeda has been immersed into an ocean of art at a very early age. Graduated from the Instituto d’Arte of Florence and collaborating with international art magazines (Rio, Kult magazine), she is used to mixing drawings, photographs, watercolours and even collages, managing to build a world full of lightness and dream-like effects — as if the Alice in Wonderland set had met animés and geishas. A world where everything could be possible.