Kickstarter

The film is a passion project for Kristanna Loken, who grew up on her parents' apple farm. The farm, which will also serve as the primary location for the film, has been in her family for 41 years.

This is an independent feature film that is being created outside of the Hollywood studio system. All Kickstarter donations will go directly toward production costs associated with principal photography.

"Love Orchard" takes the viewer within the complex illegal immigration crisis to meet the migrant-working Salazar family and the Dobbe family that employs them--both families walking the symbiotic tightrope of mutual need that has coiled around their necks and threatens to strangle them and the family farm.

The time is 2009. Oscar Salazar and his wife Angelina have traveled to Mexico to visit their ailing parents. Upon returning to America, their visas are denied even though they have valid work papers. Their plight is further complicated by an illegal child, Maria, being born while they are in Mexico; the other four children, having been born in the U.S. during the family's 18 years employment at Love Orchard, are citizens. Oscar decides to enter the U.S. illegally. The four legal children cross the border in a car driven by Oscar’s naturalized sister, while Oscar and Angelina, carrying Maria and supplies, guided by a “coyote,” sneak across the border at night. They encounter near death experiences while crossing the treacherous Arizona desert before linking up with the rest of the family at their stateside safe-house. Their hazardous journey is juxtaposed alongside that of Dobbe daughter, Karen, a rising star in an old line arch-conservative law firm. Karen's journey may not be physically dangerous but most certainly threatens her moral and emotional well-being.

The Salazar family arrives safely at Love Orchard where they are lovingly reunited with the Dobbe family and their life regains a semblance of normalcy amidst the soothing tempo of spring and another growing season…until the INS raids Love Orchard and orders a Deportation Hearing for the now three year old Maria!

The stage is now set for the balance of the film: The ongoing David & Goliath struggle by the Salazar and Dobbe families versus the U.S. government. The “Maria Salazar Case,” a definitive microcosm of the overall U.S. illegal immigrant controversy, is taken all the way to Washington by the reoriented Karen who, by opting to defend Maria, befuddles her predatory boss and cons the ultimate Washington powerbroker into saving Maria. Not solely a political drama, “Love Orchard” has a dash of political satire, romance, and some light and lovely moments along its entertaining way, somewhat akin to another such socially conscious, morally infused film, “Erin Brockovich.”