THE FAREWELL by Lulu Wang

Chinese-born, U.S.-raised Billi reluctantly returns to Changchun to find that her beloved grandmother, Nai-Nai, has been given mere weeks to live, although 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.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
A theme in a lot of movies about family lies or secrets is that there’s a big catharsis that comes from telling the truth. I wanted to play against this in The Farewell. I didn’t want the film to place judgement on any character or on the family’s decision to hide the truth from their matriarch. Nobody’s a bad guy in this family. To me, it’s really a story about ‘love languages,’ about how we express love in different ways culturally and individually and how that can create a lot of miscommunication in modern families, especially families that find themselves between cultures. But that the things we’re communicating are still based in love — just because people aren’t expressing love in the way you want to hear it or expect to hear it doesn’t mean they don’t love you. The whole time I was in China, I had more questions than answers. But I realized this was also exactly the kind of story I most like to tell — stories that mix pathos and absurdity. This situation was a true-life screwball setup, but there were bigger questions inside the comedy.

TITLE The Farewell

DIRECTOR Lulu Wang

NATION USA, China

YEAR 2019

DURATION 98′

CAST Zhao Shuzhen, Awkwafina, X Mayo, Hong Lu, Kong Lin, Tzi Ma, Diana Lin, Gil Perez-Abraham, Ines Laimins, Jim Liu

TRAILER