The Farewell

When they find out that Nai Nai, their adored mother and grandmother, is suffering from an incurable illness, her family, following Chinese tradition, decide not to tell her the truth. They therefore use her grandson’s marriage as pretext for a family reunion so as to share her last moments of happiness together. For her granddaughter, Billi, born in China but brought up in the United States, the pretence is harder to keep up. But it is also for her the chance to rediscover her roots and the intensity of the ties which link her to her grandmother...

“I really didn’t want to pass judgement on the characters, nor their decision to hide the truth from their grandmother. No one in this family has reprehensible behaviour. For me, it’s a question of telling a story about the ‘languages of love’, that is to say about our different ways of expressing our love, given our culture and our personalities.” Lulu Wang