Fourteen days remain until Dear You opens in North American theaters on Friday 4 September. The Chinese family drama, written and directed by Lan Hongchun, follows Xiaowei, who travels to Thailand to track down a grandfather believed to be a wealthy man who has gone silent over debt troubles, and finds the search harder than the family expected.
The film is built almost entirely around non-professional actors, led by Li Sitong, a finance graduate with no prior screen credits, and it is performed in Teochew, a regional Chinese language rarely heard in a wide release. That choice gives the film a grounded, unpolished quality that fits its small-scale, intimate premise better than a cast of recognizable faces would.
Made for around $2 million, Dear You became one of the year's biggest hits in China, earning close to $300 million over the spring and summer on word of mouth alone. Well Go USA is opening it across the US and Canada, including AMC, Regal and Cinemark locations, an unusually wide footprint for a subtitled regional-language drama.
It is a smaller, quieter release than most of the month's slate, built around family, long-buried correspondence, and the distance between what a family remembers about its past and what it can actually prove.
