Lulu Wang: the filmmaker who told the story her family was still living

Lulu Wang

Photo: Michiel Hendryckx / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 25, 1983 Beijing, China
Occupation	Filmmaker
Known for	The Farewell, Posthumous
Awards	Independent Spirit · Academy Award (nomination)

The practice has no clean translation into English. When a Chinese family learns that a grandparent has been given months to live, they sometimes make a collective decision: they will not tell her. The diagnosis will be withheld. The family will gather under another pretext — a wedding, a homecoming — and say goodbye without saying goodbye, because the burden of a dying person’s grief is one the living can carry and she cannot be asked to. Wang’s grandmother was diagnosed with lung cancer in Changchun, China. The family gathered. The wedding was real but the reason was not. Wang flew from New York and watched her grandmother serve tea to people who were weeping inside.

Wang was born in Beijing, the eldest child of a father who was then a diplomat and a mother who worked as a cultural critic and editor. She arrived in Miami at age six having already absorbed something of what family obligation looks like from the inside. She learned classical piano at the New World School of the Arts, studied literature and music at Boston College, and made her first short films there — work that was apprentice-level but pointed, built around the tension between things that could be named and things that could only be shown.

The Los Angeles years started slowly. She founded Flying Box Productions and worked in legal video production — the unglamorous infrastructure of a film career taking its first shape. Shorts accumulated. A debut feature arrived: Posthumous (2014), a romantic comedy set in Berlin, starring Jack Huston and Brit Marling, pleasantly made and largely overlooked. It gave Wang professional credibility without the thing she needed more, which was an argument she could not stop having.

The argument was the story she had been not telling. In 2016, she told it partially — on National Public Radio’s This American Life, in a segment she wrote and narrated herself about her grandmother’s cancer diagnosis, the fake wedding, and the ethical rupture she felt between the Chinese family logic and the American one. The listener response made clear the story had weight. Studios were less certain. Wang pitched The Farewell for years to backers who could not locate an American audience for a film set mostly in China, spoken mostly in Mandarin, starring Awkwafina in a dramatic role no one had yet seen her play.

When The Farewell debuted at Sundance in 2019, the critical consensus arrived quickly and held. The film was precise where it could have been sentimental, funny where it could have been only sad, and honest about the way grief divides along cultural lines without making that division its only subject. A24 released it that July. It became one of the year’s most successful specialty releases, earned Wang an Independent Spirit Award for Best Film and an Oscar nomination for her screenplay, and put Awkwafina on a trajectory toward a Golden Globe.

The Farewell was repeatedly framed — in reviews, in award citations, in feature profiles — as an immigrant story. Wang has consistently pushed back on that label. The film is set almost entirely in China, most of its characters are Chinese nationals, and its central argument is about grief and the specifically Chinese practice of protecting a dying person from her own diagnosis. The immigrant label, she has suggested, says more about American cinema’s limited vocabulary for stories that are simultaneously Chinese and universal than about the film itself. A film about death was received as a film about belonging — a correct reading of part of it, but a reduction of what the film was actually asking.

The Amazon Prime Video series Expats (2024) was a different kind of project — an adaptation of Janice Y.K. Lee’s novel, set among American women living in Hong Kong in 2014, with Nicole Kidman in a performance of sustained restraint. Wang wrote and directed all six episodes herself, an unusual concentration of authorial control for a streaming series. Critics who expected the immediacy of The Farewell found instead a more deliberate accumulation of unspoken things. The series was shot partly in the real neighborhoods of Hong Kong before the city’s current political atmosphere made such access impossible — a document, in that sense, that will become more historically specific over time.

Wang married filmmaker Barry Jenkins — director of Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk — in December 2024. The two have spoken about working in overlapping registers, both drawn to stories that treat emotional restraint as a formal choice rather than an evasion. Her production company, Local Time Productions, holds a first-look deal with Amazon Studios.

In development since September 2025 is Audition, an adaptation of Katie Kitamura’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, co-written with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Martyna Majok and produced with Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions and Laika Studios. It stars Lucy Liu and Charles Melton. The project continues the formal interest that runs through Wang’s work: in what people permit themselves to see, and in what they decide, together, not to.

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Tags: Nicole Kidman, Awkwafina, Barry Jenkins, The Farewell, Chinese-American cinema, Expats

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