Article by Marcus Siu`

It’s been one incredible year for Bay Area first-time feature filmmaker, writer-director, Sean Wang.

Last January, his first full feature-length film, Dìdi, (meaning “Younger Brother”) had its world premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival where it won the the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award and Special Jury Prize for Best Ensemble Cast. In the same week, his documentary short, Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó, which premiered at the 2023 South by Southwest, where it won both the Grand Jury Award and Audience Award, was nominated for Best Documentary Short Film at the 96th Academy Awards.

Dìdi was also selected the Opening Night film at the San Francisco International Film Festival last April.

“It’s been it’s been a crazy few months. We had our hometown premiere of our movie…such a love letter to the Bay Area”, Wang exclaims the following day at the SFFILM Lounge to a small crowd after its Dìdi premiere, “Still kind of floating a little bit on cloud nine but it made me think about just the seeds of all of this.

Attending the Opening Night for Dìdi, Wang wore a sporty black blazer along with a white t-shirt proudly displaying Joan Chen’s name on it. The actress plays the loving immigrant mother to Chris, a thirteen year old teenage boy who makes his way through a series of firsts that his family can’t teach him (how to skate, how to flirt, and how to eventually how to love your mom) preceding his freshman year in high school.

Just turning 30 years old, Wang’s rise to success as a filmmaker came quite rapidly. Raised in the Bay Area in Fremont, California where his film was shot, which seems to becoming a popular location spot for movies these days with Indie filmmakers. It’s the second movie in the last two years to be released that features the East Bay’s fourth largest city, along with last year’s movie, Fremont.

“It was all on location, all in places that felt so hyper familiar to me,” Wang says. It fed not only into the personal story he wanted to tell, but also into his hopes to cement Fremont into the burgeoning contemporary canon of Bay Area films, from San Francisco’s Medicine for Melancholy and The Last Black Man in San Francisco to Oakland’s Sorry to Bother You and Blindspotting.

“They capture their cities, and the locations are so vivid and colorful and vibrant, and I thought, there is a story to be told in Fremont,” he says. “This story is maybe not as loud, but it’s just as emotional. I wanted to do something for my corner of the Bay Area.”

It’s also a love letter to all the coming-of-age films and to the directors of those films, that inspired him during the years such as “400 Blows”, “Fruitvale Station”, “Stand by Me”, “Short Term 12” and “Lady Bird”.

Dìdi is a semi-autobiographical film and opens up with a scene that all mischievous teenage boys can relate to; having the time of their lives by igniting neighborhood mailboxes and fleeing from getting caught. Thus sets the tone for Wang’s personal film.

Dìdi is set in the Summer of 2008 in Fremont, where Taiwanese-American Chris Wang (Izaac Wang) lives – in an all-female fatherless household, since dad is working abroad. All except his caring mother are somewhat dysfunctional with language and generation barriers that prevent them from fully understanding each other, especially with grandma at the dinner table.

Chris has a small circle of multi-cultural friends who all share the love of skateboarding, including his best friend Fahad (Raul Dial). When not hanging out together they keep in close contact on AOL Instant Messaging when they are at home on the internet planning their next outings. Chris also has a huge crush on a girl who he stalks on Myspace (Mahaela Park), only to be “nervous” when they are together after she confesses she “likes” Asian boys. As Chris wants so much to be accepted socially, he has his own identity problems that prevents him from being who he really is.

With a cast of professional and first-time actors, the casting director should get special recognition as the ensemble was near perfect. Izaac Wang (Raya and the Last Dragon), who plays the lead as Chris Wang, seemed so natural and convincing that you would never have thought he was a real actor. Especially when working alongside veteran global icon, Joan Chen as his mother, one of the most respected actresses of Asian cinema, who is usually cast in flamboyant and dramatic roles, unlike the one she is here.

“It is a character that resonates very deeply with me.”, Chen says. “I am an immigrant mother who brought up two American children who had extremely tumultuous teen years…adolescence. I haven’t played the character like Chungsing (Chris’s mother) before; so gentle…warm…”

However, it was Chang Li Hua, Wang’s real life 86-year old grandmother (Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó), who may have stolen the show with the scene where Chris and his older sister (Shirley Chen) get into an intense verbal yelling match at the family dinner table, resulting in a side argument with the judgmental Chinese speaking grandmother condescending down on mother on the issue of how to properly raise kids. It was probably the film’s most hilarious moment.

“My grandma who had never been in a narrative film before, could act next to Joan and have it feel like the same movie,” says Wang, whose own 86-year old grandmother Chang Li Hua, plays Chris’s grandma in the film. “They share their most intense scenes together, and for a lot of actors of her caliber, it could be like, What is this movie with a bunch of first-time actors who have never acted before? This is beneath me. It was the total opposite. It was such a joy, such a dream. She would stay on set and do origami with my family.”

Wang’s path to becoming a filmmaker was untypical. As a teenager, he would shoot footage of his friends jumping off trees, then editing and adding music to it, and eventually posting it on YouTube. Wang confessed, “I didn’t know that was filmmaking until years and years and years later and it all traced back to skating for me. I fell in love with skating. It was something I truly have such a pure love for. It never left. I think that that skating just gave me ethos and introduced me to cameras and photography making skate videos.”

During those early years, Wang connected with the skating videos directed by Spike Jonze.

“He had made a skate video that was really emotional”, Wang reflects. “This is weird…Why am I crying watching a skate video?”, Wang questioned and replied back. “Because it’s Spike and that was the seed of everything! I don’t know what this is, but I could do this for 24 hours a day.” From that moment on, Wang knew he wanted to be a filmmaker.

He started making wedding videos and random commercials for local companies and was earning decent money while attending community college. When he went to USC, he realized that their school curriculum forced you to make a choice in a specific field in film school, but Wang wanted to be knowledgeable in every facet of filmmaking, and already knew he wanted to write and direct his own films.

He also initially realized that he didn’t want to waste his time to writing scripts that would require huge budgets that would probably never be made. Wang recalls doing a Google search for “movies made for under $1 million” and just started watching movies that were small in budget, such as Barry Jenkins’ “Medicine for Melancholy” and David Gordon Green’s “George Washington”.

“Oh! What are these feature films that are small independent films that look like they weren’t $200 million blockbusters? Maybe there’s a path through this side of things. They made these for so little – but they’re so amazing and just shoe box in production but not in emotion – and maybe I can go this route.”

Both of his films, Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó and Dìdi have something in common. They are packed with heart, honesty and emotion but on a shoe-string budget.

“I think those ideas, both of these films are so small and contained and somehow they ended up with a worldwide theatrical distribution plan”, Wang says. “The short got nominated for an Oscar. That must have been the cheapest nominated short of all time. We shot it with a crew of three people, so the fact those two were indies; so small and personal, all of a sudden having this giant platform and having it within months of one another, it just sort of feels like so unexpected. That’s not why we made it but I’m certainly thrilled that it happened.”

After graduating USC film school, Wang worked at Google’s Creative Lab in 2016 with a one year residency. His objective was to figure out his next step on how to make a feature-length movie without the obstacles that would normally burden the production. Wang was thinking at the time, “I do want to make a feature one day and I heard all these stories saying that it takes seven to eight years to get overnight success and I was like, man, if I’m gonna make a feature I should start now.”

From the looks of it with his first full-length feature, Dìdi, Sean Wang’s meteoric rise came right on schedule.

The film has a limited release Friday, but goes world wide after that.