‘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

deadline.com:

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. “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.