The Farewell: Representation and Diaspora Grief

Production Context: Lulu Wang’s The Farewell (2019)

The Farewell was directed and written by Lulu Wang, expanding on her 2016 This American Life episode ‘In Defense of Ignorance’ — her own family’s experience of the Chinese cultural practice of withholding a terminal diagnosis from a dying relative. The film was produced by Big Beach, Depth of Field, Kindred Spirit and Ray Productions, and distributed by A24 in the United States and Entertainment One internationally. Cinematographer Anna Franquesa Solano shot the film; the score was composed by Alex Weston, used sparingly. Editors Matthew Friedman and Michael Taylor cut the film. Made for around $3 million, the film was shot largely in Changchun, China, with some New York sequences. It premiered at Sundance 2019 and won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature; Awkwafina won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy, the first actress of Asian descent to win in that category.

Representation Focus: Diasporic Chinese-American Identity and Grief

The written-paper question on global non-English-language film focuses on representation. In The Farewell, the central representational concern is the diasporic Chinese-American experience: the particular position of people who inhabit two cultural frameworks simultaneously and whose grief, communication and moral values do not map cleanly onto either. Billi, the New York-based protagonist, returns to China for a wedding that is itself a socially organised deception — the family has agreed not to tell the grandmother, Nai Nai, that she has terminal cancer, following a Chinese cultural norm. Billi’s objection to this practice is partly American, partly personal, and partly generational: the film represents the hyphenated identity not as a problem to be resolved but as a permanent condition to be inhabited.

Wang’s representational strategy relies on formal restraint: long static takes, wide ensemble framing during family meals, a score used sparingly, and language-shift cuts between Mandarin and English. These micro choices collectively construct a film in which grief is expressed through indirection and cultural ritual, not through dramatic declaration — a representational argument that the emotional register of the hyphenated experience does not translate into Hollywood convention.

Micro Analysis: The Opening Billi-and-Nai-Nai Phone Call

The film opens with a split-screen telephone conversation between Billi in New York and Nai Nai in China. Wang and Solano use a medium close-up for Billi — framed against the cold light and neutral walls of a New York interior — and a slightly warmer, softer framing for Nai Nai, set within the familiar domestic clutter of the Changchun apartment. The micro contrast between these two lighting and spatial registers is immediate: even in the same phone call, the two characters inhabit visually different worlds. At the macro level, this opening sequence represents the diasporic condition at the most fundamental level: physical separation, connected by a communication technology that simultaneously shows proximity and distance. The warmth of Nai Nai’s space codes China as the emotional centre of the film, even as Billi’s New York frame is her current reality.

Micro Analysis: The Wedding-Banquet Hall Set Piece

The wedding-banquet hall set piece is the film’s most formally complex sequence in terms of ensemble staging. Anna Franquesa Solano uses wide ensemble framing throughout: the large family group is held together in single frames rather than being broken into individual close-ups, and the long long takes hold the scene of social performance and suppressed grief in a single continuous observation. The lighting is warm and high-key — the festive surface of the occasion — but the static camera position means the spectator can watch the competing emotional registers of each character simultaneously: Nai Nai’s genuine pleasure, Billi’s contained anguish, the rest of the family maintaining the collective lie.

At the macro level, the ensemble framing in this sequence represents the family as a collective body engaged in a collective act of care — the withheld diagnosis. The mise-en-scène of the banquet — the round tables, the formal clothing, the abundance of food — codes this as a Chinese cultural ritual in which social performance and emotional suppression are not hypocrisy but a form of love. This is the film’s central representational argument about the diasporic cultural ethics: the withheld diagnosis is an act of tenderness, not deception.

Micro Analysis: The Closing Slow-Motion Street-Walk

The closing sequence of The Farewell uses a single sustained slow-motion family walk through the streets of Changchun. Solano holds the wide frame, and the slow motion extends the duration of a gesture — the family together in a public street — that would otherwise be entirely ordinary. The non-diegetic score (Alex Weston) enters here for one of its rare appearances, gentle and unhurried, coding the sequence as elegiac rather than triumphant. The slow motion does not aestheticise the family as a spectacle; it gives the ordinary act of walking together an emotional weight that the rest of the film’s formal restraint has been building toward.

At the macro level, the closing sequence represents the diasporic condition at its most tender: the family together in China, which may be one of the last times, and the spectator understanding through the slow-motion frame that what they are watching is already passing. The film’s representational argument about grief is made not through dialogue or dramatic declaration but through a formal choice — slowing time — that embeds the emotional reality in the visual texture of the image.