In 2018, three years before the movie “Fremont” began filming, two of its Bay Area-based producers decided they better pay a visit to the movie’s namesake city in Alameda County to deal with “a bit of a crisis.”

“Somebody in Fremont’s Iranian Afghan world had started a rumor that there was a film being made about an Afghan girl, and that it wasn’t going to be respectful to Afghan sensibilities,” recalled Sudnya Shroff, who lives in Los Altos Hills and drove to the city with fellow producer Marjaneh Moghimi of Atherton.

British Iranian director Babak Jalali and his co-writer Carolina Cavalli had indeed written a feature film about an Afghan young woman in Fremont, but the last thing they wanted to do was offend the community. With the city home to the largest Afghan population in the United States, having the support of the local Afghan diaspora felt critical to the production team.

“所以我们去满足美军陆军(阿富汗)长老nity center, and I went through the script, translating and describing scenes from beginning to end,” said Shroff, a Stanford University graduate who speaks Urdu, has worked in refugee camps in Greece and India, and had lived in Fremont herself 20 years earlier.

She remembered grandmothers in the room revealing their reservations by asking, “You mean there’s no kissing?” Shroff assured them: “No. Forget kissing. There’s no holding hands!”

“It was an odd and scary process,” she added, “but we got their blessings. That was a real turning point.”

In lieu of overt romance, Jalali’s fourth film (the London-based director also shot his 2016 sophomore feature, “Radio Dreams” in the Bay Area) uses wry, deadpan humor to convey empathy for its protagonist, Donya, played by first-time actor and real-life refugee Anaita Wali Zada.

“Fremont” is a melancholic and unexpectedly funny film about Donya, a 20-something Afghan refugee who starts a new life in the East Bay city. A former translator for the U.S. Army in Kabul, Donya came to the U.S. on an evacuation flight after the Taliban regained power in 2021. Eight months into her move to Fremont, Donya commutes to a job at a fortune cookie factory in San Francisco’s Chinatown and mostly keeps to herself. She’s restless and remains aloof even from her Afghan neighbors who accuse her of treason for working for the Americans.

Exasperated by her loneliness and enervating insomnia, Donya seeks out a therapist (Gregg Turkington) for help. She also decides to drive across the state for a blind date, but has to stop with car trouble and meets a car mechanic named Daniel, an endearingly awkward loner played by Jeremy Allen White of “The Bear.”

In other words, as Jalali said by phone from London, Donya is much like many young women her age, seeking human connection and understanding in a disconnected world.

“Donya comes with baggage and has what you’d call survivor’s guilt, but she has the same aspirations and dreams as a young woman anywhere,” he said. “She could be a 22-year-old from Manchester, England, or from Idaho.”

The film’s black-and-white visual style and its casual wit have been compared to Jim Jarmusch’s mellow realism in “Stranger Than Paradise” (1984) or “Down by Law” (1986) by critics after its Sundance Film Festival premiere in January. (The film also screened at the66th San Francisco International Film Festivalin April.) It’s a thoughtful, humorous human portrait that only hints at larger geopolitical realities.

Jalali said he wanted the movie’s quirky, deadpan tone to avoid the tendency of many refugee dramas to “become quite heavy when dealing with a subject such as a displaced person.”

“Often they place the onus on the audience to pity such a character,” he continued, “whereas what I hoped to do was just show Donya as a human being.”

His task became immeasurably easier when, after a lengthy and fruitless casting search, he met Zada, a journalist in Afghanistan whose evacuation story from Kabul just months beforehand mirrored to an uncanny degree the fictional Donya.

“I was completely terrified in preproduction that we weren’t going to find someone suitable” for the role, admitted Jalali, who also worked with nonprofessional actors in his earlier films. After holding open casting calls across the United States and Canada, he received an email from Zada, whose friend had told her about the role.

“She said, ‘Hi, I’m 22. I arrived on one of the evacuation planes when the Taliban returned. I’ve been resettled in Maryland for the past five months. I’ve never acted before. My English isn’t great. But this sounds interesting.’ ”

They met over Zoom, and Jalali said he knew immediately that she was right for the lead role, which required her to be onscreen in just about every frame — “it was like someone sent her from the gods.”

It was another stroke of good fortune when he landed White, just a few months before the world got to know him as Carmy, the lead in the acclaimed Hulu series “The Bear.”

Unsure who would portray Daniel, Jalali reached out to his friend and former roommate, director Antonio Campos, whose first film, 2008’s “Afterschool,” starred a 16-year-old White. To Jalali’s surprise, the longtime “Shameless” actor loved the script and agreed to drive up to the Bay Area from Los Angeles three days later to film his first scenes.

Those also happened to be Zada’s first two days ever being on camera.

The night before they started shooting, Zada had seen how many Instagram followers her new co-star had and “came to me a little nervous, saying, ‘This guy is very well-known,’ ” recalled Jalali with a laugh.

“I think the best thing that happened was having her acting initiation across from someone like Jeremy,” he said. “She was thrown into the deep end, and after her first 30 minutes of nervousness, she completely connected with him and what was happening in the scenes.”

Jalali hopes audiences, especially knowing he has the support of Fremont’s Afghan community, will let themselves embrace the movie’s offbeat humor as well as the everyday absurdities of Donya’s life in the Bay Area where she — like Zada in real life — is now part of one of the largest displaced populations on Earth.

“I think audiences can be wary of laughing, particularly when confronted with a subject that’s foreign because you don’t want to laugh at someone’s culture,” he said. “But it’s really OK to laugh at their situation. When I’ve introduced the film at film festivals, I’ve actually had to say, ‘It’s OK to laugh. No one’s going to be offended.’ ”

Jessica Zack is a freelance writer.