Director Lulu Wang’s sophomore feature-length film, The Farewell, is one of the year’s best. As a second-generation Chinese American myself, the film hits particularly close to home in a way I never expected to see on the big screen; a transcendent examination of the gap between cultures and generations, The Farewell is a funny and emotionally poignant portrait of a family and the secrets it keeps. Minor spoilers ahead…

In a cultural zeitgeist that is crying out for representation, Lulu Wang’s The Farewell is a curious piece of filmmaking. If a movie like Crazy Rich Asians is the colorful and boisterous gateway to better Asian representation, then The Farewell is the quiet ideal. A profound meditation on young vs. old and East vs. West, Wang’s second feature-length film looks to bridge a generational and cultural divide not through right and wrong, but through reconciliation and understanding. Awkwafina (Ocean’s Eight, Crazy Rich Asians), in her most subdued role yet, puts forward a powerfully relatable performance, and one that will resonate with all audiences. The film conveys a simple - yet powerful - message: whether we confront death and mortality through pious obfuscation or head-on acceptance, grief and heartbreak are universal, and letting go isn’t always easy.

The Farewell is a semi-autobiographical film adaptation of director Lulu Wang’s personal journey in dealing with her grandmother’s illness - an experience that she recounted on NPR’s This American Life in 2016. In a half-hour segment, Wang narrates her story: a few years ago, her Nai Nai (her father’s mother) had been given a terminal diagnosis of lung cancer. Believing that breaking the news would also break her spirit and hasten the inevitable, the family decided to keep the diagnosis from her. At the same time, they also decided to move up the timetable on her grandson’s wedding, giving the entire family a reason to visit China and say goodbye. The Farewell is a masterful screen translation of this story. Deeply personal and much funnier than one would expect from such a heavy narrative, Wang’s film is clearly a labor of love and an introspective examination of mixed cultural identity. Awkwafina plays Billi, a fictionalized version of the director grappling with a secrecy dictated by tradition, caught between not only two cultures, but two generations. In an interview with Vox, Wang states: “…Yes, the movie’s about identity, but it’s more about what happens when you leave home. What are the values that you bring from the home that you left, and what are the values that you leave behind? What do you adopt? Those are questions about identity that go much, much deeper than the color of your skin and what you look like.”