When Lulu Wang, the Chinese-American filmmaker who has quickly become the toast of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, learned that her family planned to keep her grandmother’s terminal lung cancer a secret from her, she was ambivalent. Didn’t her grandmother deserve to know? This is the ethical question that anchors the delightful family drama The Farewell, which Wang wrote and directed based on her own peculiar true story.
Opening with the intertitle “based on an actual lie,” The Farewell follows Brooklyn artist Billi (Awkwafina, in her first starring role) as she travels to her native Changchun, China to attend her cousin’s impromptu wedding, though the event is really just an elaborately improvised excuse for Billi’s relatives to see their beloved Nai Nai one last time. Back in Changchun after many years in the US, Billi is obliged to mask her grief and internal quandary while trying to clarify her own conflicted remembrance of the China she once called home.
from No Film School http://bit.ly/2DOB75H
via IFTTT
Comments
Post a Comment