Film Screening — Dìdi

Sean Wang, 2024, 91 min, USA, English and Mandarin with English subtitles, DCP

Introduced by Prof. Cynthia Dong (English Department)

In 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can’t teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love your mom.

“A wonderfully uncomfortable, deeply hilarious coming-of-age movie ... Didi plays like an extended and surprisingly welcome visit to the filmmaker’s childhood bedroom.” – Globe and Mail

“[T]he secret to the film’s poignancy and lasting power is the way Sean Wang conceives the character of Chungsing—an artist whose talent for and dedication to painting goes largely unnoticed both inside her house and in the contests she enters—and the manner in which the luminous Joan Chen plays her. The Last Emperor star cycles through regret, nervousness, resentment and an intense love for children whose lives she barely understands, all with such deftness that you don’t realize until it’s over that the film is as much about Chungsing’s potential artistic flowering as it is about Chris’.” – The Observer