Sean Wang’s Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó was one of my favorite documentary shorts of this entire season. Since winning prizes at AFI Fest and the Seattle International Film Festival, Wang’s intelligent and loving film has captured the hearts of the Academy and nabbed a nomination in the Documentary Short category. With tremendous passion and a gentle hand, Wang introduces to his two grandmothers with unflinching eyes. Yes, there are arm wrestling bouts and even some passed gas, but Wang’s honesty in confronting the questions about the end of one’s life is the true reason to meet his wonderful grandmothers.
How would your grandmother like to be portrayed on film? Every time I watch Wang’s film, I wonder if I didn’t get to know mine well enough before they passed. Luckily for us, Wang has been filming his family for years, so a documentary short film on Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó didn’t feel like anything unusual to them.
“They were thrilled from the very beginning–I didn’t convince them,” Wang admits. “We have done stuff together, and I even released a Christmas card video with them. With how crazy, chaotic, and, in some ways, stupid something like that is, they are not foreign to the idea of their filmmaker grandson wanting to make a video on the fly. When I brought up them being in my movie, they were really excited. I think they love doing those skits with me where I point a camera at them. Being transparent about how I wanted it to explore the themes that we may have talked about in broad strokes over the years was something I wanted to express. The pain of getting older and the loss of people in your lives–your friends or your husbands. I knew the broad strokes, and I wanted to know more. I also wanted a personal record of these stories, because we truly are the biographers of our own stories. So much of the impetus of this movie was feeling Nǎi Nai’s fragility–she’s ten years older than Wài Pó. I made this movie when I was living at home for some time, and when I finally do move out, that could be the last time that I see her. Nǎi Nai says that sentiment in the film as well, and I think she feels the same way that I feel. It was about the fun and the silly since that is our relationship and our everyday, but I also wanted to go deep to make sure we cover the things that I want to know and I need to know.”
Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó is like a photo album yanked up on its feet, and I couldn’t help but wonder how much footage the director had shot.
“That’s a good question,” he says, thoughtfully. “We shot for eight days, but there is also a lot of home video. There are just hours and hours and hours. There is so much on the cutting room floor–it was a tough edit.”
Wang’s feature film debut, Didi, debuted last month at the Sundance Film Festival to universal acclaim, and it centers on a young boy growing up with an older sister and their mother while their father is working in Taiwan. For those of us familiar with the music, mood, and surroundings of the early and mid-2000s, Wang’s film feels like he unearthed home movie footage that we forgot we had tucked away in our attics. Didi and Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó would make for a curiously indelible double feature, and we are so lucky to witness Wang experiencing this moment.
“What they have in common is how personal they are,” he says. “The narrative feature is semi-autobiographical while this short is real life. To me, especially with Didi, I wasn’t interested in making a memoir or a retelling of my childhood. It didn’t start from that place. The personal and autobiographical was only a gateway because the coming-of-age arena that we were playing in felt so different since I had never seen one starring a 13-year-old Asian kid. It felt like the personal and autobiographical was a superpower and I could lean on it. I know it so intimately, and it’s truly world-building texture. It’s so unique for audiences, and that made it feel like a double whammy. In terms of storytelling, that’s a great marriage with the genre we are in. Moving forward, whether I am doing a musical or a period piece set in the 1950s, it needs to have a beating heart underneath.”
Several films in 2023 have shown their characters watching Greg Mottola’s Superbad, and I was reminded of how that movie is something you want to watch people watch–Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó happened to check out the film while their grandson and producer Sam Davis started working on something else.
“I think they have no idea what it is,” Wang says with a laugh. “We had wrapped the movie and Sam [Davis] had to go back to LA, and we were watching Superbad. Sam went to the other room and I followed him, and the movie was playing in the next room. My grandmothers came in and sat down and started watching it. My grandmother likes to read the subtitles to keep up with the English. We were watching them watch Superbad, and we were like, ‘What is happening?’ That is kind of like what our lives are like. I will get distracted when I watch something and they will come in and have a totally different perspective on it. It’s something that is entirely unique to them.”
Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó is streaming now on Disney+ and Hulu.
