The women all laughed, but Wang was sincere. “It’s all really validating,” she said. “We know what it took to make this movie. It might look effortless and natural, but when I watch the film, I see every single battle that went into it.”

When Wang first tried to mount “The Farewell,” financiers balked at the all-Asian cast, tricky mix of tones and potential language barrier — 80 percent of the dialogue would be Mandarin — and recommended that Wang add more romance and English. Still, Wang had based the film on her own family’s true story, and she was determined to hold fast to what had really happened.

“It was something else that was driving me, something intangible,” she said. “But it can be really hard to listen to that voice and trust yourself.”

Many of those same conflicts will come up again now that “The Farewell” is being positioned for an award-season run. Should the movie be categorized as a comedy or drama? And with its mixture of Mandarin and English, should it be defined as a foreign-language film or an American indie?

For the Golden Globes, “The Farewell” has been ruled a contender for the foreign-language film award, and the arcane rules of that competition restrict such movies from vying for the top comedy and drama trophies. The Oscars have no such stipulation, but the academy doesn’t classify Wang’s film as an international-feature contender, since it was produced in the United States.

These rules can feel arbitrary and out of step with the realities of an increasingly global film landscape, and Wang noted that the academy had recently come under fire for rejecting Nigeria’s submission for the international-film Oscar because it contained too much English. Pointing these things out sometimes made Wang feel self-conscious: “You go, ‘Oh no, I don’t fit in!’” Still, she was happy to be part of the complicated conversation about what constitutes a foreign film, and through whose eyes.