Washington D.C. - THE LULU SESSIONS will have its Washington DC Premiere on October 9th, 2011 at the Goethe-Institut as part of the DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival.
"LuLu" is the winner of the George C. Lin Emerging Filmmaker Award and the Best Documentary Feature at the DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival, has been nominated for 4 Grand Jury Awards, took Second Place in Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Toronto LGBT Film Festival, and Director S. Casper Wong also won the Emerging Director Award at AAIFF in New York City. Reviewers call it "bold, raging, confident," "intensely magical, " "inexplicable beauty, calmness, clarity and truth." "unforgettable...full of passion and spitfire." VARIETY says "Asian and LGBT festivals will line up for this audience puller." LA WEEKLY calls it a "Must-see" documentary!
Premiering at the Goethe-Institut (812 7th Street NW)
October 9th, at 2:00 pm
THE LULU SESSIONS is a raw and deeply personal documentary about the last 15 months of the larger-than-life LuLu, through the eyes of someone who couldn't be more different - her best friend and ex-lover, the filmmaker. Leave your ideas of boundaries in love and life behind, because this film will take you to a whole new frontier - and it's likely to make your jaw drop, laugh out loud, cry and continue to think about it long after you have left the theater.
LuLu is unlike anyone you've ever met. She's the amusingly profane, chain-smoking, no-holds-barred Dr. Louise Nutter, genius cancer research scientist and demanding yet beloved professor. Her sweet-sounding nickname, LuLu, has nonetheless, stuck from her hardscrabble childhood days as a former cheerleader growing up on a small farm in Vermont. At 42, she is told she has the very illness she researches - end stage breast cancer.
The next 15 months - LuLu's last - are an adventure that rattles her assumptions, values and places a spotlight on the boundaries of the bond between LuLu and the filmmaker. The film offers us insight not only into a deeply connected relationship but the beginning of an intimacy between two women that outgrows our understanding of friendship and partnership - and maybe even life. Lulu returns to her family farm for stability and solace but battles resurrected ghosts instead. Dying becomes a process of shedding - of long-held but stale presumptions, obligations and relationships and forging new ones.
THE LULU SESSIONS is a powerful, stark testimonial about the tenacity of love and our capacity for pushing past limits - in love, friendship, forgiveness and life itself, in the face of impending mortality. This film is one of the first personal documentaries seen through the lens of a Chinese American, queer woman. Yet, in its heart, "LuLu" binds audiences - straight or gay, Asian or not, men or women, young or old - to the most universal of stories, that of love and death.
This modern day Thelma and Louise meets Tuesdays with Morrie, prods all of us to wonder what our own final adventure will look like. And with whom will we be sharing this last ride.
About the Director/Writer
The LuLu Sessions is the debut feature documentary of director/writer S. Casper Wong. Her Shirts & Skins, a narrative short, was broadcast nationally by the Independent Film Channel and is in the Tribeca Film Institute's curated Reframe Collection. OO 1, her narrative feature screenplay, received the Alfred P. Sloan Foundations Grant for Screenwriting and Grand Jury Prize for Best Screenplay at Urbanworld Film Festival and was awarded screenwriting grants. Wong is currently working on an animated musical space adventure, and Staying Well, a feature documentary and television mini-series in collaboration with UCLA about integrative East-West medicine, and Becoming, a longitudinal documentary chronicling Chinese adoptees growing up in American families. Prior to earning an MFA in film directing from New York University, Wong was a senior attorney at IBM, a biomedical engineer and a cartoonist.
About the Editor/Co-Writer
Laura Minnear is an award-winning editor who began her work in documentaries for series such as PBS-Frontline and Nova, after a diverse background in field biology/zoology, fine arts and one of her great passions, dance. Her recent credits include GIRL WITH BLACK BALLOONS (editor, co-producer), directed by Corinne van der Borch, which premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2010 to sold out screenings, and was named one of the "Best of the Fest". BLAST! (co-editor) with director Paul Devlin premiered at Hot Docs 2009 and on BBC Storyville, and continues to air internationally and on PBS. She is currently a producer/editor for Dan Rather Reports and was recently honored as the first person to win two Front Page awards in the same year from the Newswomen's Club of New York. The stories we tell, whether on-screen or in how we choose to live our daily lives, still seem to her to be about the dance.
