‘Năi Nai & Wài Pó’ Director Sean Wang Wants His Love Letter To His Feisty Grandmas To Also Remind Us Of Hate Crimes Against Asians – Contenders Film: The Nominees
Filmmaker Sean Wang’s endearing live-action short Năi Nai & Wài Pó might seem to be perhaps the lightest of all the Oscar nominees in the category, but he had more on his mind in chronicling the lives of his inseparable grandmothers, the 94-year-old Năi Nai (Yi Yan Fuei) and 83-year-old Wài Pó (Zhang Li Hua) as they go about their daily lives, even sleeping in the same bed in their Bay Area home.
The recent spate of violence against innocent people in the Asian community in America was also on Wang’s mind as he joined us for Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees.
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“I mean, the idea of it is right there, you know, my two grandmas. The movie is full of life, and joy, and humor, and farts, and all the things that it encapsulates because they are full of joy and humor and sometimes gas,” he said. “I had moved home to the Bay Area, where they are now, where I’m from, from New York, after living there for five or six years, and it just happened to coincide with the time, you know, in American history where there were a lot of anti-Asian hate crimes happening. So, people like them in our country, but especially in the Bay Area where I’m from, and there was this juxtaposition of hanging out with these two lovely women and feeling the most pure form and immense forms of joy and silliness and humor, and then kind of being filled with extreme sadness and anger, seeing, you know, people like them be victims of these hate crimes.”
RELATED: Contenders Film: The Nominees — Deadline’s Complete Coverage
For their part, the Taiwanese grandmas were delighted, if puzzled, to be the subjects for their budding filmmaker in the family. They were thrilled to see that the film about them had been nominated for an Academy Award. They joined Wang for today’s Contenders panel and told him about their feelings.
“She said it’s beyond their wildest dreams, nothing they could’ve ever dreamed of,” Wang translated. “They gave me, their grandson, a little shout-out, which I won’t repeat, even though I just did, and you know, they said … we didn’t think we were going to get nominated, but then our name came up, and everyone around us started jumping and freaking out, and we were like, ‘Wait, is this real? Like, what is happening?’ And they’re just like, you know, it’s the American Dream for them. It’s the version of the American Dream that they could not even have allowed themselves to dream of.”
Wang had quite a week when he got the Oscar nomination, as he also won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival for his feature Dìdi, which by the way also features Wài Pó. And then word came that Focus Features had picked up the movie for release in 2024.
Good times, but it is this film that has a lasting resonance for him.
“I realized, you know, Năi Nai, at the time, she’s 96 now, that I could lose her any day. You know, and the next time I leave home could be the last time I see her,” he said. “That’s a feeling I still have to this day, and so I wanted to make something that really was a time capsule and a container to remember their spirits, remember this moment in time with them, and encapsulate all of the different emotions that they feel as three-dimensional human beings — you know, the joy, the extreme joy and silliness, and the melancholy and the sadness, and the pain.”
Check out the panel video above.
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