It’s January 19, 2024, in Park City, Utah. It’s the Sundance Film Festival. It’s seven hours before the world premiere of Sean Wang‘s feature directorial, Dìdi (弟弟). In four days, Wang’s short Nai Nai & Wài Pó will be nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary Short. And in about a week, Dìdi will snatch Sundance’s Audience Award in the U.S. Dramatic category and a Special Jury Award for Best Ensemble that includes Izaac Wang, Joan Chen, Shirley Chen, and Wang’s real-life grandmother, Chang Li Hua.
But for now, I sit with Wang in a makeshift interview area at the Sheraton Park City, which has been Sundance headquarters for as long as I have been attending the snowy film fest.
“I’m in scarf mode,” Wang tells me as he sits down as he tells me how it was difficult to find a scarf that he liked. “I went to like four different stores and finally my homey got me this.”
It’s a fine dark blue scarf and it’s quite jaunty.
Living in New York before migrating back to Los Angeles, Wang is used to the snow but he admits he is still shivering — but for another reason. “My hands are shaking,” he admitted to me after I asked if he was nervous about premiering Dìdi at one of the most prestigious global film festivals.
No pressure at all, right?
Set in 2008 in the San Francisco Bay Area, Dìdi follows the ups, downs, cringe-worthy humiliations, laughs, and loves of adolescence through the eyes of 13-year-old Chris (a breakout performance for actor Izaac Wang). As he navigates through the awkward terrain of teenage discovery — and while being from an immigrant family. Chris learns the pain of being a teenager including being told “he is cute for an Asian”, the rocky road of school, and broken friendships. He also finds joy in his early teenage years with skateboarding, filmmaking, and just being a 13-year-old. All the while, Wang captures a moment in time filled with AOL Instant Messengers and MySpace Top 8s while telling a very universal story about a mother and her son. Oh yeah, it’s an Asian American, too.
Dìdi is giving Eighth Grade energy but it’s own creature. It’s a snapshot of those cringey, formative years that we spend the rest of our lives trying to get over. Everyone — and I mean everyone has been through those awkward years. It’s a trauma bond that unites and humbles us — and Dìdi is a touchstone for that.
There’s something very special about Dìdi. During the festival, I asked fellow journalists, execs, and film programmers what they had been watching and nearly everyone answered “Dìdi” with a smile. It’s magnetic and once it pulls you into its heart-warming, mischievously charming orbit, you can’t help but fall in love with this coming-of-age tale.
“The seed of the idea for [Dìdi] probably started in 2017,” Wang started. “I love Stand By Me… it’s one of the first movies I saw that I feel captured adolescent boyhood in a way that reminded me of me and my friends. I remember watching that movie and I liked how crass they are and how broad they are, but also like how emotionally complicated they are.”
As he got older, he started to wonder why a movie about four white kids in the woods resonated with him so much. “I grew up in a very multicultural community in Fremont, California,” he said. “There are specifics about my childhood and the people that I grew up with that I haven’t seen in the movies that I loved about adolescence and movies like Stand By Me.”
His love for the very real and uncensored adolescent coming-of-age genre made him want to create a story like Stand By Me but specifically with people he grew up with — and most were Asian American kids. “It’s a movie very much about friendship and the suburban wasteland where there are no parents,” he said. “It’s just a summer with friends.”
The idea for Dìdi sat with Wang over the years. As he worked on other projects, he would jot down some notes for the yet-to-be-titled Dìdi. From there, it just grew. “The entire journey of the movie was hyper-specificity,” Wang explained. “We were making a movie written hyper specifically to these characters set it in a hyper-specific time.”
At first, he wanted to make the movie about the kids but then he felt like something was missing. He wanted to write about his family — specifically his relationship with his mother. “I made a few passion project shorts and for whatever reason, they kept being about my mom,” Wang recalled. He also made a film about his first year living in New York City chronicled by his mom’s voicemails.
“When I went to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, they asked me why I want to write about my mom,” he said. “I realized it’s the relationship in my life that is the most of every emotion. It’s like the most love but also the most shame; the most anger and the most protected… it clicked for me. This is a love letter to my mom — immigrant moms. All encased in the trappings of a movie like Stand By Me.”
Dìdi adds to a chorus of films that stray away from using a narrative driven by Asian American identity. Rather, it’s about a 13-year-old who is trying to figure out adolescence. He loves skateboarding, making skate movies for YouTube, and fights with his sister and mom all the time — and he happens to be Asian American. As we attempt to navigate this uncertain landscape of diversity and representation, this seems to be the direction many films have gone, but because of how Hollywood — let alone society was built, Dìdi will be more than likely be billed as an Asian American film first and a coming-of-age drama second. Hell, I automatically noticed it was the only Asian American entry in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. It’s a natural reaction of scarcity when it doesn’t have to be.
With Dìdi, Wang mined from his personal experience — and his personal experience comes from a Taiwanese immigrant family so naturally, the Asian American-ness of it all is baked in. Unlike 10 years ago, you don’t have to explain any of that. The movie knows what to do with the visibility of its hyper-specific, yet universal narrative.
“I didn’t want to explain anything,” Wang said. He points to one scene in particular where Chris’s mom (played by the iconic Joan Chen) puts an egg on his face when he gets a black eye. Even with the title, Dìdi, Wang wanted it to be very Chinese but have the movie be very American. And you can’t get any more Asian than a title like 弟弟.
“I don’t want to put my film next to this film because it’s one of my favorite movies but the Taiwanese film Yi Yi — American audiences love it and totally embrace it,” he said. “Nobody in America uses the English title A One and a Two — they call it Yi Yi. I figured I would do the opposite — have a Chinese title, but it’s a distinctly American coming-of-age movie.”
He also is inspired by the way recent films like The Farewell and Minari are less identity-driven and more story-driven. “My ethos is if you put representation first; if that’s the thing that’s driving you to do something, I think you’ve lost,” he said. “You have to put the story, themes, and characters. Telling a good story is what pushes the envelope forward to me,”
Wang saw representation with Hiro Murai and Daniel Kwan of Daniels. He remembers discovering and falling in love with their work on Vimeo in the early 2010s. He loved how they were Asian filmmakers creating work that was personal to them. To Wang, representation is the result of just doing the work.
Wang didn’t plan on making a pair of films based on names of family with Dìdi and Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó. “They’re deeply personal,” he said. “I had this personal barometer of authenticity… Dìdi is not autobiographical. I’m taking the autobiographical elements and shifting and adjusting them to fit the themes of the story I’m trying to tell.”
He never really asked how to make it more or less “Asian”. He always asked how to make it more personal. “Personal doesn’t have to mean autobiographical,” he said. “I wanted to make it honest to me and my friends — who happen to be Asian American.”
