You do not need to be a rocket specialist to make films, but the writer-director Lloyd Lee Choi has almost become one on the way to his first feature film, “Lucky Lu”, in the first May first at the fortnight of directors in Cannes.
“I entered Ryerson University for aerospace engineering at 17, and I was about to go, but at the last minute, I had an existential crisis,” reveals Choi. “I think many American Asian children and children of immigrants [like me] can tell. It would have been a very safe and comfortable life, but it did not feel at all, so I applied to a school of liberal arts in Vancouver and I ended up living with all the dormitory students. They corrected me to help make student films, and I fell in love with the process. »»
Another transformer moment for Choi was to find random Fernando Meirelles and the Brazilian drama of Kátia Lund “City of God”. Like “Lucky Lu” and his favorite filmmakers, the Dardenne Brothers, he explores the life of the working class and the “people on the sidelines” of society. “It fled me and opened my door to stories told outside my bubble,” he said. Well, not entirely: “My parents had this experience of classic immigrants, in terms of coming here without too much,” he adds. “They run a convenience store for years, and my grandfather worked a lot of blue passes to survive, so I really understood this Hustle and the deep desire to provide for their children.”
All this informed the portrait of Lu de Choi (played by the 2018 Cannes juror Chang Chen), an immigrant from New York whose fragile existence as a delivery man collapses when his electric bike is stolen. In a race against time, Lu is looking for his bike and his money to pay a new apartment as his wife and daughter at a long time have come from Taipei.
Canadian-Canadian co-bone-to-Canadian choi raised in Toronto, who has many advertisements to his credit, has moved to New York a few years before the Pandemic blow. “The city mainly survived delivery food, and drivers were considered essential workers suddenly,” he said. “While I would see all these different faces putting food back on. I started to imagine the sacrifices they made to feed the city, but also to survive. ” He inspired the short “same old” of Choi 2022 Palme d’Ornalined “even old”, which he adapted in “Lucky Lu”. His short film 2023 “Closing Dynasty”, another Gotham tale, dealing with poverty, won the best prices in Berlin, SXSW, AFI Fest and other festivals.
“Lucky” supports the comparison with the Italian neoral drama of Vittorio de Sica from 1948 “The Bicycle Thief” with his pathos, his suspense, some shared intrigue points and sentimental moments in the relationship of his protagonist with his young child. It took two months in Choi to find Carabelle Manna, 7, who plays the daughter of Lu, Queenie. “She has never acted before, but I’m so happy that we have taken this chance,” he said. “She really makes the film.” The same goes for cinematography, which captures Chinatown’s dark grain during a 22 -day cold and rainy shoot.
Choi, who is recommended by WME (also the national representative of the film, alongside the international film Constellation) and Canopy Media Partners, has at least two other films in his sleeve. The first will probably be a sporting drama of the oppressed, “a story of Korean-American father-son about the rise and the fall of a prodigy golfer”. The other is a mystery thriller and a portrait of motherhood taking place in Korea, focusing on another delivery man. But do not expect Choi to move too much from its dramatic Indiees. His golf film is “more tonnely aligned with something like” Whiplas “that” Happy Gilmore “, he says.
