Sean Wang — and his Grandmas — Will Rep Fremont at the Oscars

Sean Wang is having an awesome start to his year. The 30-year-old filmmaker from Fremont is nominated for his first Academy Award at this weekend’s Oscars ceremony for Best Documentary Short Film. Wang’s 17-minute documentary Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó (Grandma & Grandma), available to stream on on Disney+ and Hulu, sweetly captures the daily routines of his two grandmothers who live together in Fremont.

Before getting that golden news from the Academy, Wang debuted his first feature film, Dìdi, at the Sundance Festival. A coming-of-age story that Wang calls “a love letter to the Bay Area, Fremont especially,” Dìdi won two festival awards and was picked up by Focus Features, which will give it a limited theatrical release this summer.

I caught up with Wang over Zoom to talk about life since the Oscar nod, his filmmaker origin story in the Bay (“everything traces back to skateboarding”) and more.

Interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ariana Proehl: A lot of people have seen the reaction video of you and your family receiving news of your Oscar nomination. What’s the ride been like since then?

Sean Wang: So surreal. This experience has overlapped with premiering my first feature film, so it’s two incredible experiences happening at the same time. It really is beyond my wildest dreams. And to get to do it with my grandmothers and have them really enjoy this process – and feel like we’re giving them a core memory at 96 and 86 years old – there’s no real downside.

And how are your Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó feeling about everything? Are they excited to have their glam moment at the Oscars?

Yeah, they’re getting styled by Rodarte and Shirley Kurata, who was a costume designer for Everything Everywhere All at Once. So we’re giving them a Hollywood night that, hopefully, we’ll remember forever.

That’s huge! Have they become local celebrities around Fremont?

They don’t leave the house much, so I don’t think they’re getting stopped on the street or at the Chinese supermarket, but certainly within the cultural circles that I am a part of. At the [Oscars] luncheon, people were like, “Oh my God, it’s the grandmas!” And so that’s a very strange but cool experience to have them be noticed and seen like that.

Flashing back a little bit on your history, I’m curious when you first realized you wanted to be a filmmaker, and how you went about exploring that while growing up in Fremont?

Everything traces back to skateboarding for me. I’m a younger sibling; all of my cousins in the States are older than me. For a lot of my early years, my interests and my identity was looking at them and what they liked. But then I discovered skating when I was 12 or 13 years old, and that was just a very pure love. It was something that was really my own.

Through skating, I got into photography and videos and filming my friends. I started making little documentaries, and that was like a buzz for me. I was excited about putting it on YouTube, but I didn’t really have the language for it – that it was “filmmaking.” I just really loved doing it.

When I graduated high school, that was the first real fork in the road, where it’s like, okay, is there a career doing this? Growing up in Fremont, there just isn’t that language. I didn’t know any other filmmakers. There were no examples that I could really follow. But I knew that whatever this was, it was a very pure love. I ended up at De Anza [Community College] for two years, and the intention was to transfer to a film school and that’s what happened.

Let’s talk about your Oscar-nominated film. There’s a part when Wài Pó says, “in the future, you can show your children what we were like.” That really struck me. My family just laid my grandmother to rest a few weeks ago. So watching your grandmothers made me think about my own, and it’s really cool that you’ll get to have this memory of them after they are gone. I’m guessing that was at least part of the motivation and inspiration behind it? Did you go into it thinking about a short film, or were you just wanting to capture memories?

Thank you for sharing that with me. It was both, I think. The catalyst for the film was just wanting to film them and make something. I moved to New York City after I graduated college and lived there for about 5 or 6 years. Then in the spring of 2021, I moved home to the Bay Area, and in that period of living with them, there was so much joy. I really got to see my grandmothers and experience day-to-day life with them.

But there was also this extreme anger and helplessness that a lot of people were feeling at that time with Covid, and with the rise in anti-Asian violence that was happening to people like my grandmothers, and people in our community. As a filmmaker, anytime I feel those emotions that are so visceral, it challenges me to ask, “Where are these emotions coming from? And how can we use that and create art?”

The antidote to the anger was their joy. I wanted to make a film that was a container for all of their humanity, their joy, their silliness, their infectious, childlike energy, but also their pain and their lives that they lived before they were my grandmothers. And create a holistic portrait of that to show just how human they are, in a way that I felt people were overlooking in our society.

But to what you were saying, at the end of the day, there was this home video mentality that we brought to it, where I just wanted to remember them and remember this moment that I had with them. So even if nobody watched it, it was still a memento and a time capsule for myself and my family.

Do you have a favorite scene from the film?

There’s a shot in the end montage, where me and Nǎi Nai are touching foreheads. That shot always makes me emotional. I always thank [producer] Sam [Davis] for capturing that. I edited the movie too, so there were moments in the edit that always gutted me. There’s a moment where Wài Pó was talking about, “I’m not afraid of death.” You can tell she’s thinking about mortality in those moments and you can see it in her eyes – not just the pain, but the humanity. And she takes a little sigh, and that moment always gutted me.

What’s the feeling amongst your family in terms of this accomplishment, and all the excitement going into the Oscars?

They’re all excited. We were able to get tickets for the whole family, so it’s really a proper family affair. I feel like I’m the grandmothers’ “plus one” in all of this. As long as they’re having a good time and they feel taken care of, I’ll feel like I’m having a good time. At the end of the day, we’ve already won because this experience has been so special.

If you take home the Oscar, is there a favorite spot in the Bay Area where you and your family would go to celebrate?

That’s a good question. Growing up, we used to go out to dinner at Darda Seafood in Milpitas all the time. We haven’t been in years. But that was like a family tradition. Maybe we’ll bring that back for this one.