Lulu Wang is good at showing why a family might keep a secret, even when somebody has every reason to object. We value her warmth and fairness, though The Farewell sometimes explains what its actors have already made clear.
Fi1m perspective
In The Farewell (2019), a family uses a fake wedding to gather around a grandmother without telling her she has terminal cancer. Lulu Wang gives Billi’s objection proper weight, then lets the family’s wish to spare Nai Nai fear seem reasonable too. We recommend the film because she makes that disagreement funny and painful without making either side look foolish.
The film was Wang’s breakthrough, following Posthumous (2014), her first feature, set in Berlin’s art world. With the autobiographical The Farewell, she brought together family secrecy and the competing demands of individual honesty and collective duty. Her later television work, the six-part Hong Kong-set Expats (2024), broadened the subject matter to privilege, identity and community. She directed every episode and brought crew members from The Farewell with her.
Her recurring collaborators include cinematographer Anna Franquesa-Solano and production designer Yong Ok Lee. Wang’s care over the arrangement of family dinners and gatherings matters because these stories need us to understand the group, not simply follow one person’s complaint. In The Farewell, the family has to organise an occasion while concealing its purpose from the person it is for. That practical business keeps a dispute about truth from becoming only a discussion.
Awkwafina and Zhao Shuzhen are central to why that works: their performances make the family’s deception difficult to dismiss. We found The Farewell quietly upsetting because the wish to spare Nai Nai fear remains understandable even when Billi objects to what the family is doing. The humour gives us room to consider those motives without being required to approve of them, and Wang allows affection to survive the disagreement.
Her weakness is the urge to explain those motives again. The Farewell occasionally makes the family’s thinking too tidy, when the actors have already made it understandable. We would like her to trust that understanding for longer and leave some disagreements unsettled. Start with The Farewell, and give its family time to make their case.
Biography
Lulu Wang is a Chinese-born American filmmaker. She was born in Beijing on 25 February 1983 and moved to Miami as a child. She studied piano at the New World School of the Arts and graduated from Boston College in 2005 with a double major in literature and music.
Wang began her career with short films, including Pisces (2005). Her feature debut Posthumous (2014) was followed by The Farewell (2019), which she wrote, directed and produced. The film premiered at Sundance, was distributed by A24 and received the Independent Spirit Award for Best Film. She later directed the miniseries Expats (2023–2024).
Wang married filmmaker Barry Jenkins in 2024.
