SF FILM FESTIVAL THURSDAY: APRIL 18 THE FAREWELL
The Farewell
This entry is a few days past the day I saw it because I had to drive home that night to be with my family. They cleared the SF Film Festival website which I usually copy for this blog so I won't have a lot of information to copy for the last two films.
The Festival chose this as The Centerpiece film of the festival because they believe Lulu Wang the director is an up and coming director to take note of. I wish I had written right after the screening because I was so excited about this film. The whole concept was great. A Chinese-American girl from New York doing a film about her family and extended family where they go on a trip to Shanghai to meet for a wedding/last chance to see Grandma. Also, she filmed it in Chinese! I thought that was brilliant. Lulu Wong had a New Yorker wit that she could step back and see the absurdity of situations and film them so you could get her angle. It was funny and heart-warming. The main character has a special connection with her grandmother and after talking to the audience we see Lulu has made this movie a special homage to her. It made me nostalgic for the the close relationship I had with my grandmother. I was also fascinated to see an upper middle class family's lifestyle in modern Shanghai, China.
Program Description
(Which I painfully have to transcribe from the program)
The Farewell
Lulu Wang, USA/China 2019, 98 min.
An ebullient tale that both celebrates and gently satirizes Chinese cultural traditions, The Farewell is impossible to resist for many reasons. Chief among them is the irrepressible Awkwafina (a breakthrough in Crazy Rich Asians, 2018), a broke Asian-American artist off to China to join her family to say goodbye to her dying grandmother. Except no one is willing to tell grandma she is sick - and to complete the ruse they force her male cousin to get married to a bewildered Japanese woman to explain why this zany family is getting back together at all.
Lulu Wang's twitter. A picture at an SF after-party for her film.
I was sitting too far away from the stage to take a decent picture. She did a good interview after the film and said that it has been 6 years since her nai-nai's diagnosis and she is still alive. They have also not told her that she has cancer as per the cultural tradition.
Trailer: The movie comes out in July 2019 and there is still no trailer but these are some good interviews. I hope I remember to add the trailer later.
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