In 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can’t teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love your mom.
In his striking directorial debut, Sean Wang takes us on a kinetic ride through the ups and downs of adolescence, mining personal experience to share a joyful, funny, and deeply affecting ode to first-generation teenagers navigating the beauty and pain of cultural heritage in a sea of conformity. Wang confidently steers us through the freewheeling early days of social media, where AIM emoticons and MySpace rankings carry the weight of heartbreak and friendships forged and broken. Both a moving love letter to immigrant parents and a playful examination of our uncertain paths to adulthood, Dìdi (弟弟) reminds us that growing up and growing into better versions of ourselves are often one and the same.—AS
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