The two elderly women are leaning in towards the Zoom screen, sitting side by side and wearing complimentary smart red outfits. In an adjoining screen their grandson, filmmaker Sean Wang (王湘聖), sits on a couch looking slightly nervous as they speak to a dozen or so journalists in Taipei.
“This feels surreal, doing a press conference with my grandmothers and seeing them answer all these questions while I’m just kind of sitting here,” he laughs. “And leading up to the Oscars … I say it out loud and it doesn’t feel like a real sentence.”
Wang’s grandmothers, Chang Li-hua (張麗華), 86, and Yi Yan-fuei (易揚輝), 97, have had a big few months. His short documentary about the duo, in-laws but also housemates and best friends akin to sisters, has swept through awards season, and is up for an Academy Award (a video of their reaction to the announcement went viral).
Photo: Screen grab from the X account of “Nai Nai and Wai Po”
The pair have walked a red carpet at the film premiere and an Oscars lunch, and been featured in Vanity Fair. For the Oscars they would be dressed in custom Rodarte, styled by the costume designer for Everything Everywhere All At Once, Shirley Kurata.
“I’ve never dreamed of anything like this,” Yi says. “It’s like I’ve been to another world.”
The 17-minute film, Nai Nai and Wai Po (“Grandma & Grandma,” 奶奶跟外婆), offers a glimpse of the simple but full life of Yi, who is Wang’s paternal grandmother (奶奶), and Chang, who is his maternal grandmother (外婆). They raised their families in Taiwan, experiencing the extreme hardship of poverty and war and decades of martial law. Earlier this century they followed their sons to the US, settling in California’s Bay Area.
Wang has been filming his grandmothers since he was young. The “proof of concept” for this now Oscar-nominated documentary began with a Christmas card video, an absurd comedy skit of his grandmothers killing him and burying his body in the backyard after he annoys them by refusing to eat offered blueberries.
“That was 2018, and I was like ‘there’s something here.’ There’s something so much more to this that’s bigger and deeper than a one-minute Christmas card,” Wang said.
It was not hard for him to convince Chang and Yi to let him film their daily lives, including waking up in their shared bed, helping each other do morning exercises, cooking food together, singing, dancing and gardening.
“My grandson is an easygoing person,” Yi said. “He gets along well with elders and kids… At first we thought he was joking, but the movie came true.”
Nai Nai and Wai Po was filmed in the spring of 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic and amid worsening racist violence against Asian people in the US.
“I think so much of what inspired this movie was the fact that people like my grandmothers … were being dehumanized,” Wang said. “People like Nai Nai and Wai Po were being targeted, and they were being overlooked and relegated to victims of hate crime. But spend a few minutes with them and you see this joy, people who are three-dimensional and human.”
“If anything their emotions are even more visceral and heightened because those themes, like mortality, are a little more immediate for someone like Nai Nai than me,” he added.
The documentary is deeply personal, touching on family, loneliness and the feelings that come as friends pass and your own death feels acutely inevitable.
There is also humor, with clips of the pair dressing in streetwear, arm wrestling, throwing dollar bills off the staircase and a surprising amount of fart jokes. One scene shows Yi filming Chang chugging from a whiskey bottle. The bottle is filled with tea, Wang said. “Can you imagine if it was real and I was just making them chug whiskey?”
The success of the film has taken Wang by surprise. “That we’re going to the Oscars feels like this insane journey,” he said.
“If you took away the Oscars, Disney Plus, the idea that we get to share this movie with festivals and win awards, and told us that 10 people will watch this movie — including yourself, your grandmas, your parents, and the Guardian — we still would have made the movie,” Wang said.
The grandmothers said they are incredibly grateful for the film and the support it has received and are proud of their grandson, although the film is littered with jokes about his attempts to make them famous.
“Before the film I felt like we’re old and useless, but after filming we realized there is still a lot we can do, we can be characters in movies, still be functional people in society,” Chang said. “In the past, society talked mainly about the relationship between parents and children. I hope this movie will help the younger generation to get closer to their grandparents.”
WANG RELEASED: A police investigation showed that an organized crime group allegedly taught their clients how to pretend to be sick during medical exams Actor Darren Wang (王大陸) and 11 others were released on bail yesterday, after being questioned for allegedly dodging compulsory military service or forging documents to help others avoid serving. Wang, 33, was catapulted into stardom for his role in the coming-of-age film Our Times (我的少女時代). Lately, he has been focusing on developing his entertainment career in China. The New Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office last month began investigating an organized crime group that is allegedly helping men dodge compulsory military service using falsified documents. Police in New Taipei City Yonghe Precinct at the end of last month arrested the main suspect,
A cat named Mikan (蜜柑) has brought in revenue of more than NT$10 million (US$305,390) for the Kaohsiung MRT last year. Mikan, born on April 4, 2020, was a stray cat before being adopted by personnel of Kaohsiung MRT’s Ciaotou Sugar Refinery Station. Mikan was named after a Japanese term for mandarin orange due to his color and because he looks like an orange when curled up. He was named “station master” of Ciaotou Sugar Refinery Station in September 2020, and has since become famous. With Kaohsiung MRT’s branding, along with the release of a set of cultural and creative products, station master Mikan
LITTORAL REGIMENTS: The US Marine Corps is transitioning to an ‘island hopping’ strategy to counterattack Beijing’s area denial strategy The US Marine Corps (USMC) has introduced new anti-drone systems to bolster air defense in the Pacific island chain amid growing Chinese military influence in the region, The Telegraph reported on Sunday. The new Marine Air Defense Integrated System (MADIS) Mk 1 is being developed to counter “the growing menace of unmanned aerial systems,” it cited the Marine Corps as saying. China has constructed a powerful defense mechanism in the Pacific Ocean west of the first island chain by deploying weapons such as rockets, submarines and anti-ship missiles — which is part of its anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategy against adversaries — the
Eleven people, including actor Darren Wang (王大陸), were taken into custody today for questioning regarding the evasion of compulsory military service and document forgery, the New Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office said. Eight of the people, including Wang, are suspected of evading military service, while three are suspected of forging medical documents to assist them, the report said. They are all being questioned by police and would later be transferred to the prosecutors’ office for further investigation. Three men surnamed Lee (李), Chang (張) and Lin (林) are suspected of improperly assisting conscripts in changing their military classification from “stand-by
RSS