In the documentary short “Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó,” Sean Wang chronicles the inner lives of his grandmothers. Now, the film is nominated for an Academy Award.
After he moved back home to the Bay Area in 2021, weighing a move to Los Angeles amid the pandemic, the filmmaker Sean Wang would often spend time with his two grandmothers. Yi Yan Fuei, his 96-year-old Nǎi Nai (paternal grandmother), and Chang Li Hua, his 86-year-old Wài Pó (maternal grandmother), live in the same house together, and Wang quickly began to observe two versions of them. There they were, enmeshed in the quiet rhythms of their daily lives — folding laundry, peeling fruit, napping in their shared bed. Then, Wang, 29, would intrude, coaxing out their playful sides: receiving a slap on the butt or spurring a dance session.
His time with them, enjoying both their tranquillity and these moments of youth-like joy, was juxtaposed against an alarming spate of anti-Asian violence that was happening on streets around the Bay Area to grandparents just like his. It was a dissonance that both angered Wang and magnified this time with his grandmothers. Wang took to his camera to make what he thought of as a home video of them, enshrining their routines in “Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó,” a documentary short that was recently nominated for an Oscar and is streaming on Disney+.
“When I walk into the kitchen and I see them there, reading the newspaper or washing the dishes, from a very personal level, I want to remember that image,” Wang said in a video call from his apartment in Los Angeles, where he did eventually move. “I want to remember what it was like to see them do that.”
The film, alternately cheeky and humanist, flits between two visual languages, what Wang called “the movie of their lives and the movie that they’re in.” Silly skits that the director constructs for them — arm wrestling, watching “Superbad” — sit alongside quotidian snippets of their inner lives. The film is also philosophical, as his grandmothers reflect on hard pasts and consider the realities of aging.
Wang and his family’s reaction to the Oscar nomination was captured on video and recently went viral: Wang jumping for joy and embracing his grandmothers before they can even process the announcement on the telecast.
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Source: Movies - nytimes.com
