Name: Dìdi (Film Club)
Start: 2024-10-23T14:00:00+01:00
End: 2024-10-23T16:00:00+01:00
Location: Herbert Street, SA8 4ED Pontardawe, United Kingdom

$D\u00ecdi (Film Club)$

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.
Director / Cyfarwyddwr: Sean Wang
Writer / Ysgrifennwr: Sean Wang
Cast: Izaac Wang, Joan Chen, Shirley Chen
2024USA94 mins15
Review:Dìdi review – a tender, specific rendering of adolescence on the early internet. Sundance film festival: Sean Wang’s semi-autobiographical tale of an Asian American teen’s life played out online in 2008 is moving and detailed. It’s easy to roll one’s eyes at nostalgia, so often is fondness for the past used to cover a lack of anything to say. The market is flush with reboots, redos, reunions and the Eras tour, content mining our natural affinity for (and thus, the bankability of) things that shaped us. What a joy, then, that this year’s Sundance film festival featured not one but several films that accomplished the rare and difficult task of employing nostalgia without feeling cheap, that pulled us backwards to sharp, smart, devastating and illuminating effect. Dìdi, Sean Wang’s semi-autobiographical portrait of an Asian American boy in 2008 is easily one of the best, most seamless films I’ve seen on the experience of growing up online. Dìdi has a clear antecedent in fellow Sundance alum Eighth Grade, Bo Burnham’s 2018 film about a girl’s phone-inflected adolescence that is still the gold standard for affecting films about the internet. The tones are strikingly similar – understated and natural, sweet and bitingly sour, observing the ordinary thrills and horrors of growing up. Both braid the digital lives of their protagonists with striking accuracy – Facebook photo albums and comments, Snapchat stories and Instagram faces, overlaid with longing, loneliness and occasional fun.