ShortList 2023: ‘Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó’ Director Hopes You’ll Fall in Love With His Grandmothers

thewrap.com:

“Nai Nai & Wai Po” was selected as a finalist in this year’s ShortList Film Festival, presented by TheWrap. You can watch the films and vote for your favorite here.“Nai Nai & Wai Po,” (“Grandma and Grandma”), one of the finalists of TheWrap’s 2023 ShortList Film Festival, offers nothing less definitive than life itself.

Directed by Sean Wang and starring his grandmothers, the 16-minute feature chronicles a week in the life of his elders as they dance, cook and fart their way through the days and nights in the last lap of their lives.The picture, which premiered at the SXSW festival and was awarded the Jury Prize and Audience Award, is focused on the mundane, an arm-wrestling match between the 83- and 94-year-old protagonists, one of them reading the newspaper with a magnifying glass, or a moment of dancing partially to keep up with exercise since “Old people can’t afford to fall.” Through this brief snapshot, which offers fears both spoken (they both know the end is near) to unspoken (COVID-era anti-Asian hate crimes), we get a melancholy yet joyful and complete portrait of how even the most ordinary lives, when viewed up close, become extraordinary.“There’s a difference between sharing space and spending time,” Wang noted.

He used the “infrastructure of documentary filmmaking to ask deep personal questions” in addition to “having fun with them.”When asked about how much of the film was staged versus observational, Wang noted that part of the excitement was “trying to blend documentary and narrative elements.” He said he tried to “capture the mundane quotidian everyday moment of their existence.”“I knew I wanted it to go to a place of unbridled joy that I feel with them goofing around.