Based On An Actual Lie: Director Lulu Wang's Sundance Hit
"Based on an actual lie" is the whimsical, accurate opening text of director's Lulu Wang's second film, "The Farewell," which premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
Wang's dramedy, a lightly fictionalized expansion of a 2016 autobiographical episode of This American Life, recounts the elaborate ruse that her extended family enacted to bid farewell to her grandmother. The family wanted to say goodbye without letting the matriarch know she had been diagnosed with stage four lung cancer and had an expected three-month life expectancy.
The family plan? To hold a real-but-accelerated wedding for Wang's cousin in the town in China where her grandmother resides, creating an entirely plausible reason as to why a family spanning three generations and three countries would reunite to spend time with the grandmother, known as Nai Nai.
While the withholding of an inescapable truth may seem absurd to American viewers (as well as Wang herself when her parents first informed her of the scheme), such deception is not implausible in China, the movie posits. In this case, it shows doctors in China circumventing the patient and giving sensitive
