For the final presentation, I would like to talk about my final project, a short film named Way Back Home. It tells a story happened in Chinatown with a group of stowaways.
There are thousands of, millions of Chinese people live in New York, and a large part of them came to here as the illegal immigrants with their “American dream”. I just so curious about those people who live here but even cannot speak English, so I went to Chinatown frequently this semester, making interviews with some of them and finally found some stories. Then it came to this script.
It’s a story about a young women who came to New York in order to earn money for her ill son. But after experiencing many kinds of difficulties, and touching the real life here, she finally found that maybe she has no way to go back home.
The story was mostly happen in an apartment with four people, the lead role and her three neighbors. I would like to show four different kinds of “cannot come back home”.
Yu is the lead role in this film, a single mother who loves her son. She’s so hard-working and always dreaming she can go back to China in the near future.
Bo is a very young boy who is always optimistic and passionate. He came here with his uncle, who is the “snakehead” that do the business on translating those illegal immigrants to America. He was brought up by his grandmother, and the only goal of him is to build a big house to her. So after hearing his grandma’s death, the only thing he want to do is going back to see her again.
Fei Fei is a prostitute lives in Chinatown. She was cheated here by her ex-boyfriend and lost the connection with her family. And because she know nothing about here and lived with a very hard life, she chose to become a lonely streetwalker.
Yong is a chef who works in a famous Chinese restaurant. He used to be a very rich man but after going bankrupt, he escaped to here and gave up his wife and daughter.
Besides the characters, there are also many Chinese elements being used in the film to record the real life, like the Mahjong, dumplings, Chinese newspaper, the “FU” sticked on the wall. What’s more, the symbol of goldfish is also very special. The goldfish which was bought by You for her son represented the hope of going back to China. But the death of it can be regarded as the portent of this sad story.
Here’s the link of the trailer:
https://youtu.be/xOtYFYCevoA
The film is coming soon, thanks for waiting...
