The Award-Winning ‘Dìdi’ Will Transport You to 2008

Coming-of-age stories are a timeless tradition in the film industry. For decades, Hollywood has been flooded with movies that center on the trials of growing up and aim to capture the relatable, formative moments in their characters’ lives. In a summer defined by sequels and nostalgia-inducing franchises, Dìdi stands out as an original story that offers a fresh perspective in a long line of big-screen bildungsromans.

Following its limited release in late July, Dìdi expands to theaters nationwide on Friday. (In Mandarin, “dìdi” is a term of endearment that translates to “little brother.”) Written and directed by Sean Wang, the semi-autobiographical film follows a 13-year-old Taiwanese American kid named Chris (Izaac Wang), just as he’s about to enter high school. He crushes on a girl, grows distant from his childhood friends, and starts to hang out with a few older kids, all while he fights with his sister, Vivian (Shirley Chen), and his mom, Chungsing (Joan Chen), at home. While these plot points may sound familiar in the realm of coming-of-age narratives, it’s how this story is told—and the world that the film establishes—that makes Dìdi feel so refreshing even in well-trodden territory.

“For me, it was knowing that we’re playing with this genre that has the most clichés and the most tropes out of, I think, any genre, but then finding ways to infuse a language that hopefully feels new and fresh and unique,” Sean Wang tells The Ringer.

Set in Fremont, California, during the summer of 2008, Dìdi captures the internet of the era and the rise of social media on a visceral level, with the sounds of AIM chat rooms and the scrolling of Myspace pages activating core memories for any viewer who grew up in the aughts. There’s impressive attention to detail in the visual design of the film’s online interfaces, thanks to a team of four animators and graphic designers who re-created the 2008 internet for the movie by working off of screenshots. But it’s also the way that characters like Chris actually navigate the internet—with the film showing us the whole process on-screen, from his perspective—that works so effectively and feels so novel. And much of that stylistic approach comes from Wang’s unique journey as a filmmaker.

The 29-year-old is a rising star in Hollywood thanks in large part to Dìdi, his directorial debut. In January, Dìdi won the prestigious audience award at the Sundance Film Festival, where it premiered to rave reviews, before it was quickly snapped up for distribution by Focus Features. A month later, Wang brought his grandmothers to the Academy Awards to celebrate his Oscar-nominated documentary short Nai Nai & Wài Pó, which centered on his paternal and maternal grandmothers as they went about their daily lives in Fremont during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But not long before all of these accolades started coming his way, Wang worked at Google Creative Lab in New York. Far removed from Los Angeles’s film industry, he developed, directed, and edited branded content for the tech giant. His career trajectory is uncannily similar to that of Aneesh Chaganty, whose feature debut, Searching, also won multiple awards at Sundance (in 2018): Both filmmakers studied at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, worked at Google Creative Lab, and premiered their first features at Sundance. Although their paths didn’t cross until later, Wang took notice of Chaganty’s journey while receiving the same film education.

“When he sold the pitch for Searching, I took his job, and in the year and a half that he was making [the film], I was learning all the things that he applied to Searching,” Wang says. “I was learning this interesting new language of filmmaking that a lot of my friends don’t really know. And it was the language of technology, how to use a blinking cursor and all these screens to emote and make something that was human, emotional, and cinematic in a way that most people didn’t really utilize technology.”

At Google Creative Lab, the traditional tools of filmmaking—such as a camera, actors, and a script—were stripped away, leaving only user interfaces to tell stories and draw out emotions most of the time. Wang learned this approach from his bosses, who worked on early Google commercials such as the memorable 2010 Super Bowl ad “Parisian Love,” and began applying it to his own filmmaking style in short films like H.A.G.S. (Have a Good Summer). The 2021 documentary short—a New York Times Op-Doc told through a series of images and on-screen text—follows Wang as he flips through his middle school yearbook and calls his childhood classmates to reminiscence.

Not unlike Chaganty’s Searching, which takes place entirely on computer screens and cellphones, Dìdi reveals the impact that working at Google had on Wang. Without having to cut to any human actor’s reactions, the film humanizes the online experience and illustrates a wide spectrum of emotions as it draws out the humor or despair in mundane activities. Chris might simply be scrolling through a Myspace page or Facebook wall, or chatting on AIM, and we can resonate with his happiness or sadness, his shame and embarrassment, with little more than the movement of a cursor or text across the screen.

Recent films such as Searching and Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade have depicted the modern online experience in their own effective ways, but Dìdi captures a unique moment when life was only just starting to move online. “You can tell a movie that takes place entirely on screens now because our relationship to technology is that it’s in every crevice of our life,” Wang says. “You have the entire world in your pocket. But when I was 13, it was this more innocent time. I described it when I was pitching the movie as almost the ‘pre-technology technology era,’ where you were still going outside and having these summers with your friends that felt like Stand by Me or The Sandlot—you were just goofing off, creating your own fun.

“Then you’d come home and go on AIM, Myspace, and Xanga,” Wang continues. “You were starting to live your life online, but there was this divide where you could sign off and not be on the internet.”

The film’s use of technology is far from the only way that Dìdi transports its audience to life in the late aughts. Livestrong wristbands, iPod Minis, and music by Atmosphere and Motion City Soundtrack are among the many nostalgic reference points that have a specificity to them that comes from firsthand experience. (Wang was even able to get Motion City Soundtrack to release their first new song in almost 10 years, “Stop Talking,” which plays over the movie’s credits.)

“The hope was always that if it triggered something for me, hopefully it will trigger something for people who grew up during a similar time, who had similar cultural experiences,” Wang says. “That went to the props, the setting, the set dressing, the costumes. I obviously had very specific things I wanted to try to bring into the movie, but then [costume designer Brianna Murphy], I gave her my middle school yearbooks, and she had her middle school yearbooks too, and high school yearbooks. And so we really looked at those as research, and we found a lot of new things.”

Looking back through old yearbooks is what led Wang to make H.A.G.S. in 2021, as the filmmaker planted seeds in his short films that would later sprout into Dìdi, a feature whose script he tinkered with on and off for five years. Dìdi is loosely based on Wang’s personal experiences, along with those of his friends and family. Even as the line between Wang’s childhood and Chris’s blurs, there’s a grounded richness to the world that stems from its setting. Wang shot the film in his hometown of Fremont, where locations that the filmmaker visited growing up were transformed into movie sets. Chris’s house is Wang’s actual family home.

Dìdi’s commitment to authenticity extends to the makeup of its cast, which combines a core group of trained actors—Izaac Wang, Shirley Chen, and the legendary Joan Chen—with first-time, mostly local actors. With the exception of the film’s young star, the kids were cast from local sports camps or middle schools in the East Bay area, as the community became as central to the movie as any other aspect of it. And among that group of newcomers is Sean Wang’s maternal grandmother (or “wài pó”), Chang Li Hua, one of the costars of Nai Nai & Wài Pó.

Hua plays Chris’s Nai Nai, rounding out the film’s on-screen Wang family. While Wang describes working with his grandmother as one of the best experiences of his life, it was still one that came with some stress. “This decision to me felt like the biggest [risk],” Wang explains. “I was kind of like, if this works, it would be a home run, but if it doesn’t, this could be the biggest swing and a miss. Because all the kids in the movie had this energy to them that felt very alive and made sense for that world and because they were all surrounded by other first-time nonactors. But my grandma is surrounded by all the veteran actors. Her scenes are all basically opposite Joan Chen.

“In [Nai Nai & Wài Pó], what we realized was that Nai Nai was just too old to even entertain the idea, but Wài Pó is the age as scripted,” Wang continues, describing the 86-year-old Hua. “And she’s so charming and youthful and sprightly and has these eyes that are so soulful. … There was a part of me that was just like, ‘All right, fuck it. Let’s do it.’ And she was like, ‘If you’re that confident in me that I’ll do a good job, I’ll do it. I’ll try my best.’ And she really took it seriously. She was off book every scene. She did her homework and had opinions, and she became an actor, like a proper actor.”

Wang’s bet paid off. Hua carries the natural charisma and comedic timing that she demonstrated in Nai Nai & Wài Pó into her performance in Dìdi. She holds her own in scenes with Joan Chen, whose acting career in Hollywood and Chinese cinema spans decades, including work with the likes of David Lynch, Ang Lee, and Bernardo Bertolucci. And that says a lot given the early Oscar buzz that Chen is deservedly receiving for her part in Dìdi.

Chen anchors Dìdi, just as her character anchors Chris’s family. Perhaps above all else, Dìdi is a love letter from Wang to his mother, and the relationship between Chris and Chungsing serves as the film’s emotional core. As much as the story revolves around Chris’s angsty adolescence, it also considers Chungsing and her own struggles and insecurities as she defers her dreams and sacrifices part of her individuality to raise her children while her husband works in Taiwan.

These nuances in Dìdi’s characters, and the dynamics of their relationships, really help distinguish the movie from so many other coming-of-age films, which rarely focus on people who look like Dìdi’s cast. The film paints a beautiful, raw portrait of the Asian American experience without making it contrived or on the nose. It’s simply a part of who these characters are. With Izaac Wang’s captivating and vulnerable performance leading the way, Dìdi highlights the challenges that accompany growing up as an Asian American. Chris desperately tries to blend in with his peers and make friends, even if that sometimes means trying to conceal his racial identity.

“Having vocabulary for shame and embarrassment, those are conversations that we’re having now,” Sean Wang says. “[Growing up], we didn’t have the vocabulary to unpack those feelings and actually dissect what the feelings were. And looking back, I think the word to describe it is this ambivalence, and that stemmed from feeling maybe ashamed of certain things. And the reason that shame was there was because—you hear it in the movie—it’s like, ‘You’re cute, for an Asian,’ or just the way that you hear certain things that, back then, was a net positive. … How do you process that as you’re growing up? What does that do to your sense of self, if that’s the cultural standard?

“For Chris, it’s a lot to unpack, and he doesn’t have the maturity or the emotional distance to unpack any of it,” Wang continues. “And throughout my 20s, I started to have distance from it, and me and my friends started talking about it. I think collectively as a culture, as Asian Americans found a little bit more of a voice and platform, we got to realize, ‘Oh, this is a shared experience.’”

Dìdi puts that shared experience on full display, including the more difficult parts of it that have been internalized by generations of Asian Americans. By seamlessly blending riotous, sometimes absurd comedic moments into a heartfelt family drama that addresses these topics with an understated tact, Dìdi depicts growing up in all of its messy glory. And by returning to the place, and the experiences, that made him, Sean Wang is starting his career in Hollywood off strong.