Behind the giggles and farts shared between the two Taiwanese immigrant grandmas who star in the documentary short “Nai Nai & Wài Pó” is a critical statement about anti-Asian hate, the film’s director said.
Director Sean Wang, whose film follows his own grandmothers, who live together as platonic soulmates, said he made the short as a counter to the narratives around Asian elders during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
“When I saw the headlines during that time, and when I saw people like my grandmothers portrayed in the media … they painted them as these people who were just sort of victimized and overlooked,” said Wang, who spoke to NBC News ahead of Sunday’s Oscars, at which the film is nominated for best documentary short. “What I was trying to get at was trying to make something where if you saw the film, the next time you see someone who looks like them on the streets, you really see a human being.”
The 17-minute documentary takes an intimate look at the unique sisterhood between Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó, Wang’s paternal and maternal grandmothers. The pair initially met because of Wang’s parents and took a particular liking to each other. They became close after the deaths of their husbands, and eventually they chose to live together. In the film, the grandmothers spend their days reading the paper, throwing two-person dance parties and pulling other shenanigans while ending their nights by sleeping in the same bed. There’s also the occasional fart or two.
The film is littered with short, hilarious “skits” orchestrated by Wang, in which the pair make it rain with some cash from the top of the stairs, chug whiskey from the bottle and arm wrestle. The doc may be rife with laughter and moments of levity, but it also doesn’t avoid talk of mortality and loss.
“The days we spend feeling pain and the days we spend feeling joy are the same days spent,” Nǎi Nǎi says in Mandarin. “So I’m going to choose joy.”
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