There were a lot of hyped movies coming out of Sundance this year, and for the many critics and journalists attending the festival, there was perhaps one that stood out from the rest – Lulu Wang’s THE FAREWELL. The dramedy centers on a Chinese-American woman (Awkwafina) who learns that her grandmother is dying of cancer, but instead of telling her the family decides to travel to China for a wedding as an excuse for them all to see her one last time. Picked up the almost always reliable A24, the first trailer was released today showcasing the poignant drama and the reviews hailing it as one of the year’s best.
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Moving away from comedies like OCEAN’S 8 and CRAZY RICH ASIANS, star Awkwafina is giving a mostly dramatic performance about a woman reconciling how to approach death from both a Western and Eastern perspective. The two sides clash as the rest of her family just wants to spend the final few weeks with their grandma Nai Nai in abject happiness. Based on Wang’s own experiences with her grandmother, THE FAREWELL was picked up by A24 at Sundance for a whopping $7 million, beating competitors like Netflix and Amazon.
Here’s the synopsis:
In this funny, uplifting tale based on an actual lie, Chinese-born, U.S.-raised Billi (Awkwafina) reluctantly returns to Changchun to find that, although the whole family knows their beloved matriarch, Nai-Nai, has been given mere weeks to live, everyone has decided not to tell Nai Nai herself. To assure her happiness, they gather under the joyful guise of an expedited wedding, uniting family members scattered among new homes abroad. As Billi navigates a minefield of family expectations and proprieties, she finds there’s a lot to celebrate: a chance to rediscover the country she left as a child, her grandmother’s wondrous spirit, and the ties that keep on binding even when so much goes unspoken. With The Farewell, writer/director Lulu Wang has created a heartfelt celebration of both the way we perform family and the way we live it, masterfully interweaving a gently humorous depiction of the good lie in action with a richly moving story of how family can unite and strengthen us, often in spite of ourselves.
THE FAREWELL is in theaters July 12.