“It’s a very personal, very specific story.” Lulu Wang talks thefarewell at DeadlineContenders presented by Hyundai | Photo by REX/Shutterstock |
, in her first big dramatic role, plays Billi, a Chinese-born woman raised in Florida who learns her grandmother back in China has only a short time to live. Billi and her family travel to Changchun to say farewell under the guise of attending a wedding, but Billi is under strict orders not to tell her Nai Nai she’s terminally ill, lest it shorten her life even more.describes itself as “based on a true lie.
“It’s a very personal, very specific story,” Wang commented. “So in many ways we thought well, if it limits our audience that’s okay because we’re really making it for the people that come from where we come from and kind of feel marginalized in America as an American. Definitely wasn’t expecting it to go so wide and I was just hoping it got into Sundance.”
Which it did, going on to win awards at film festivals including Atlanta, Cinetopia, the Heartland Film Festival and Sundance London.“My Chinese is not good,” she insisted. “White people, they always tell me, ‘Oh, it was really good.’ I’m like, ‘Thank you.’” Awkwafina recalled filming a key scene on location in China with Shuzhen Zhou, who plays her grandmother, a spectacle that attracted some unexpected attention.
“We were shooting the goodbye scene which is [a] very heavy scene which is where we’re saying goodbye in the end and there was this group of hecklers that gathered around us because we were shooting in like an active apartment complex,” she said. “This group of hecklers at first were blowing raspberries and laughing, giggling. And then halfway through the scene it’s like I just heard silence. Then I looked up and they were all crying.
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