The Farewell

All opinions are my own, not those of my employer. Each time I re-watch The Farewell, I am struck by how well the film captured the zeitgeist of returning to China as an ABC in the 90s — aughts. The director, LuLu Wang, authentically brought to life moments that were…

Full Transcript of Technicolor Theatre podcast: Season 2, Episode 1 — In the first official episode under the Mediaversity banner, filmmaker Aditya Joshi and Mediaversity Reviews founder Li Lai bond over their immigrant backgrounds, the feeling of losing someone overseas, and a mutual love of Lulu Wang’s The Farewell (2019). The episode aired on August 4, 2020 under the podcast’s previous…

When I was younger, I used to think that withholding vital health information from loved ones was selfish and robbed friends and family of expressing love, affection and appreciation, or, at the very least, officially saying goodbye. Not being able to tell someone how much you love them is a…

White Lies The opening shot of the film, The Farewell, shows a picturesque painting of some mountains surrounding a lake. A phone rings and Nai Nai, the matriarch whose death is central to the plot, walks into frame from the left and begins a phone conversation with her granddaughter Billi. The film…

Farewell on the Plane On the plane to London, I had tears running down my face. It wasn’t fear of the unknown in the UK. It wasn’t the distance, the length of time I would be away from home for the first time. It was The Farewell. This was only a couple of days…

Year-end top-ten lists are for suckers. The entire exercise doesn’t map to how I experience film. I increasingly care less about the end-to-end taut construction of a movie and care more about what all that expensive scaffolding allows filmmakers to do: deliver those brief moments of communion with the audience…

How Lulu Wang’s “The Farewell” shows us with humour and honesty how certainty collapses — and when and why it should collapse The question is this: Is knowledge of reality worth more than pleasure? Or, more poetically, is a beautiful lie preferable to an ugly truth? Imagine with the philosopher…