Didi (弟弟) Premieres at Sundance and wins big!!
When we started working on Didi in the summer of 2023 we knew it had a pretty good chance of going to Sundance but that’s always the hope going into any project. Sure director Sean Wang had gone through the labs and the producers on the project had also premiered films at the festival before but you never truly know. It was a fun but grueling project to work on. Sean wanted it to feel like summer camp and i think it eventually did turn into that. The first 2 weeks of production were a little tough because we crammed a lot into the schedule do to the cast mainly being made of under 18 year olds which gives us limited time each day to shoot. But i remember the day it started feeling like summer camp. We were shooting at an elementary school and at lunch everyone started skating, shooting hoops, throwing the basketball, dancing, or something that just felt like something out of the intro to a movie. My wife Gillian was the UPM on the film and we moved up to the bay area for the summer. I grew up in the bay and my dad was a fire fighter in Fremont as well as i have family that lives there. I was also in high school in 2008 when this film took place so it had a special place in my heart. Originally I was going to do off site transcodes and uploading to Frame IO every night so the editor could start working back in LA. I don’t normally work as that but i’ve done it many times for my own projects and it allowed me to still be apart of the film. But then when it was decided there would be about 8/25 days that needed to be 2 cameras. I jumped at the opportunity but of course Cinematographer, Sam Davis, needed to approve me as we had never met before. Luckily Sam was kind, gracious, compassionate, and very talented filmmaker. Our first call felt very natural and i didn’t feel like there was a lot of pressure. I’m thankfully for Sam to allow me to join the production as a camera operator which also led me to shooting additional photography for the film. I still did the offsite DIT work which was challenging at times but we never went into OT and didn’t do any “fraturdays” thankfully.
After the first week of shooting it was clear having 2 cameras in our wild schedule was going to be valuable for the pacing so I ended up joining the film for almost every day of shooting. That was only possible because of my Dad who saved the day and watched after our twin daughters who were just turning 2 at the time of filming.
We wrapped at the end of August and of course to our delight, in got into Sundance 2024. I hadn’t seen a cut so the premiere was the first time myself and many others were seeing the film. It blew me away, the final film was just as good if not better than the script that i had loved so much. As i have told Sean, i think he does on screen computer storytelling better than anyone else, except maybe the filmmakers on Searching. I’m hyper critical of the films that i work on and how we could have done better but i truly don’t know what i would have changed about Didi. We left Sundance and soon found out it not only won the Audience award, which is probably the biggest honor, but also best ensemble. Which is a testimony to the casting team because it was their first film and most the actors had never acted in a film before. The film is now going to be distributed by Focus Features and may even come to theaters this summer!!
I have so many emotions and things i wanted to say about this film but at the end of the day thank you to my wife, UPM Gillian Mahar and line producer Scott Wickman for putting me up for this film. Sam Davis for taking a chance on an operator he didn’t know for his first feature ever. Producing team Valerie Bush, Carlos Lopez Estrada, and Josh Peters for letting me be involved. And the amazing camera team lead by Will Dauel, Ron Witt, Annie Li, Drew Dorsey, Alex Guibert, Abby Alcala, Oleksandr Shvachko, Brandon Smith, Jordan Livingston, and Iris Lee.
