Lansing-area native's film nominated for Academy Award
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POTTERVILLE — "The days we spend feeling pain and the days we spend feeling joy are the same days spent, so I'm going to choose joy," Yi Yan Fuei, 96, says.
By the time she explains her approach to life, there are less than three minutes left in "Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó," the 17-minute short film Potterville native Sam Davis co-produced.
The documentary features Fuei and Chang Li Hua, 86, dancing, arm wrestling and playing dress-up together at their family home in Fremont, California.
The Taiwanese women have something "very special," Davis, 31, said.
That was obvious five years ago when Davis' good friend Sean Wang shared a 1-minute, 8-second video featuring the pair entitled, "Christmas Card." Fuei, Wang's Nǎi Nai or paternal grandmother, and Hua, his Wài Pó or maternal grandmother, are memorable in the light-hearted holiday greeting, which ends with them dragging Wang's body into the backyard, seemingly to bury him for being disrespectful.
Davis and Wang knew then that Wang's grandmothers needed more screen time.
"Despite being 182 years old, combined, they have this sort of infectious, youthful spirit and we wanted to see if we could capture that in a film in some way while also delving into some more serious elements of their lives," Davis said.
Their film, which Wang directed and Davis shot and co-produced, is among five nominees for best documentary short film at the Academy Awards on March 10.
A love letter to two grandmothers
This is the second time Davis, a 2011 Potterville High School graduate, has helped make an Oscar-nominated film. In 2019 "Period. End of Sentence," a film he had a hand in producing, editing and filming, won an Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject.
That documentary, filmed in Hapur, India, examined the stigma that surrounds menstruation, and the limited access girls and women there have to sanitary napkins.
"Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó" is a love letter to Wang's grandmothers, who began rooming together at Wang's childhood house after both his grandfathers passed away.
The pair are "late-stage soulmates," Davis said. They sleep in the same bed, exercise together and read the newspaper together.
Both Fuei and Hua were skeptical when Wang and Davis approached them about filming their everyday life.
"Who would anyone want to watch a movie about us?" Davis remembers them asking.
Wang and Davis started filming them in 2021, training the camera on the women as they cooked, ate, read the newspaper, made jokes and reflected on their lives. The finished documentary is heartfelt, silly and a portrait of what aging sometimes looks like.
"While we were filming, we knew it was going to be very special," Davis said. "We didn't know what it was going to be. We kind of made the movie without much of a plan and we made it the way we used to make things before we knew how to make movies."
The crew consisted of Wang, Davis and one other person.
"We stayed at the house and kind of woke up every morning and saw what Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó were up to," Davis said. "Then they would take a nap and we would take a break. It was very casual, very organic, the way we made the movie but even then, even at that time, I think we knew we were on to something special."
Headed to the Oscars
"Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó" premiered last year on the film festival circuit, winning recognition and awards. That, along with the Oscar nomination, has been gratifying, Davis said, because it's proof plenty of people want to watch a movie about Fuei and Hua.
"It's just been the coolest," he said. "And it's sort of the most epic way of making them feel seen which I think is really meaningful because so often, especially with elderly people, they really do go unseen. I think the film is a good reminder that getting older doesn't have to mean fading away."
Disney has since acquired the film, and it was released on Disney+, the company's streaming platform, in February.
Davis, Wang, Fuei and Hua will all attend the 96th Academy Awards ceremony on March 10. Davis plans to bring along his father, Paul Davis, who lives in Potterville.
"He went to Men's Wearhouse in Lansing yesterday to pick out a suit," Davis said.
Davis also helped work on Wang's first fiction feature film, "Dìdi," which was acquired by Focus Features and will premiere in theaters this summer. Hua plays a role in the film, Davis said.
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Contact Reporter Rachel Greco at rgreco@lsj.com. Follow her on X @GrecoatLSJ .
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Lansing-area native's film nominated for Academy Award
