Film Club: THE FAREWELL
About this Live Online Event
The Sundance Institute is excited to launch its new Film Club campaign, a monthly, community-driven deep dive into the soul of independent cinema and the Sundance Film Festival.
Each month, the Sundance Institute will highlight one film from the recently-published Sundance Film Festival 101 Watchlist. As part of Film Club, Sundance Collab will host a free, online event each month to analyze the film in depth from script to screen. We will kick off this campaign with a look at The Farewell, LuLu Wang’s beloved, semi-autobiographical first feature.
Film Club host Kiva Reardon will dive into The Farewell before leading a collaborative discussion with the Zoom audience. Reardon is a film producer (Sorry, Baby), critic (cléo journal), and programmer (Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, TIFF) who will serve as the lead lecturer and host for all 12 sessions of Film Club.
The Farewell premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, where it was soon acquired by A24 for worldwide distribution. The film chronicles the story of a Chinese-American writer (played by Awkwafina) who travels back to her hometown in China after learning that her grandmother has mere months to live. A family dramedy in the tradition of many Sundance Film Festival classics, The Farewell is a poignant and disarmingly funny portrait of family unity and dysfunction.
Upon its premiere, the film went on to screen at more than 30 festivals, gross more than $20 million at the box office, and receive honors from the Golden Globes, Independent Spirit Awards, National Board of Review, Gotham Awards, and elsewhere.
In this session, Reardon will deliver a lecture on the film’s cinematic style, the use of autobiography, and The Farewell’s lasting impact. The session will include clips, discussion, and close with an audience Q&A in which attendees can ask the instructor questions.
Don’t miss the inaugural event in our monthly Film Club series with Kiva Reardon to discuss Lulu Wang’s The Farewell!
Claim your free spot now.
If you would benefit from an accommodation to fully participate in this event, please complete this form, contact us at (435) 776-7790, or email us at accessibility@sundance.org to discuss your specific requests. Every effort will be made to accommodate advance requests; however, requests made within 5 days of the event may not be guaranteed.
A recording of this session will be posted to Film Club within two business days of the live event. Everyone who registers for this session will receive an email with a link to view the recording when it is posted!
Live Online EventTeam
Kiva Reardon
Host
Kiva Reardon is a producer, writer, and programmer working across fiction and non-fiction. Previously, she held the positions of: Vice President of Film at Barry Jenkins’s production company PASTEL; Associate Director of Film Programs at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures; and Lead Programmer of Contemporary World Cinema at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).
She founded cléo journal, a publication dedicated to film and feminism, which ran from 2013 to 2019. Under Kiva’s leadership, cléo became an internationally-respected outlet that helped launch a new generation of film writers. IndieWire called cléo an "essential source for smart, fresh, and feminist perspectives on film and media." Its print compendium was published in 2020.
Her writing has appeared in Filmmaker, Sight & Sound, MUBI Notebook, Cineaste, and many others. She writes a newsletter on movies and motherhood, Care Takes. She has acted as an advisor at screenwriting labs and served on festival juries at Locarno, Jeonju, Palm Springs, Aspen, and more. She has spoken at film and art institutions around the world. She is on the founding Advisory Board of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies.