Dìdi | movie | 2024 | Official Featurette
In 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy | dG1fbVl0bWEwLXJMeDg
Category
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Short filmTranscript
00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 - Hi, my name is Sean Wong.
00:06 I'm the writer and director of "Di Di,"
00:08 which is premiering in the US Dramatic Competition
00:11 at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
00:15 (upbeat music)
00:17 Di Di means little brother in Mandarin,
00:23 but it's also a very endearing term
00:25 that a lot of Chinese parents call their younger sons.
00:28 And our movie is a portrait of adolescence
00:30 as seen through the lens of a 13-year-old
00:33 Taiwanese-American boy who, in the last month of summer
00:35 before his freshman year of high school,
00:37 learns a lot of the things that his family
00:39 isn't able to teach him, including how to skate,
00:42 how to flirt, and how to love your mom,
00:45 which is sort of our way of saying that
00:47 underneath the joy and chaos of adolescence
00:51 is a complicated and turbulent,
00:53 but ultimately tender relationship story
00:56 between this boy and his immigrant mom
00:58 as they struggle to understand each other
01:01 despite their cultural and generational differences.
01:04 The very initial seed of this idea was
01:06 what if you took a movie like "Stand By Me,"
01:08 but set it in a place that I know
01:10 and had it star people who looked and talked
01:13 and felt like the kids that I grew up with?
01:15 And it's my hope that by rooting the audience
01:18 in this young boy's perspective,
01:20 one that I think hasn't really been explored before
01:22 in movies of this kind,
01:24 we can create something that may evoke familiar emotions,
01:27 but ultimately feel like something
01:30 audiences have never seen before.
01:32 Starring Isaac Wong, Joan Chen, Shirley Chen,
01:35 Zhang Lihua, AKA my grandma,
01:38 and an incredible ensemble of largely first-time actors
01:42 who are so electric and charismatic.
01:45 I can't wait for you all to see their performances.
01:47 I'm so excited to share the movie with you,
01:49 and I hope you'll come check it out.
01:52 Thank you so much, and bye-bye.
01:54 (upbeat music)
01:58 (upbeat music)
02:01 (upbeat music)
02:03 (upbeat music)
02:06 [BLANK_AUDIO]