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Sining Xiang submitted his film to the Beijing Queer Film Festival, scheduled for later this year, amid an ongoing government crackdown on the L.G.B.T.Q. movement.
In 2018, Sining Xiang brought his American boyfriend, Patrick, to China to visit his family. He introduced Patrick as his good friend, and his family didn’t suspect a thing. Xiang was thirty-one years old at the time, and had quit his electrical-engineering job in Silicon Valley a couple of years prior to that to attend an M.F.A. program in film production and directing at U.C.L.A., where he met Patrick. Xiang had spent his entire twenties struggling with the question of whether to come out to his family, and, when he saw his relatives with Patrick for the first time, it was constantly on his mind.
After the journey, back in Los Angeles, Xiang wanted to make his thesis film about Patrick and Naonao, his seven-year-old nephew. The two had formed a close bond on that trip. “I found it to be really touching,” he told me. “They had this very pure and innocent friendship.” Around the same time, Xiang came out to his family, on a video call. His parents struggled with the news; Naonao’s parents, more open-minded and supportive, helped persuade them to be more accepting.
“Foreign Uncle,” Xiang’s subtle and deeply personal film, depicts a somewhat dramatized version of that experience, in which his character’s relationship with Patrick is revealed by accident, during their visit to China. The details of the discovery are fictionalized, but his parents’ immediate reactions in the film closely resemble reality. Xiang’s mother laments that she should never have sent Xiang to the U.S. Most of Xiang’s family members and Patrick portray themselves, and their performances give the film a strong sense of intimacy and realism. Only Xiang and his mother are played by actors; his father’s character is away on a business trip and doesn’t appear. While the film was being created, it was still unclear if his parents would come around, and Patrick wasn’t too comfortable acting with Xiang’s mother. But Xiang’s parents were very supportive of him making the film; they helped out on the set—and even make a cameo in a scene at the beach. “They couldn’t yet accept [that I was gay], but they knew that the film was important to me, from a career and personal-interest perspective,” Xiang told me. “And they saw how difficult it was to make an independent film, and perhaps realized how hard I’d been working in the past few years.”
Xiang is a longtime fan of the director Chloé Zhao, who, even before her Oscar-winning “Nomadland,” had been known for casting nonprofessional actors in her films. The idea of letting real people act out their real lives appealed to him. Xiang told me that his main challenge was to calm his relatives’ nerves so that they could act naturally. Sometimes that would mean filming a dozen or so takes for a single scene, but the result was clear on the screen. Surprising connections formed on set: Xiang’s mother became close friends with the actor playing her, who also helped her come to terms with her son’s identity.
Xiang also developed a newfound courage and sense of defiance. “Before I was about thirty, I was very scared of people finding out that I’m gay. There was a lot of shame and guilt,” Xiang said. “Then I thought, Since I’m going to make a film about this, at a time when a lot of L.G.B.T.Q.-related content is getting banned in China, I’m going to go ahead and use my real name to tell a story that adds visibility.” Xiang submitted the film to the Beijing Queer Film Festival, scheduled for later this year, amid an ongoing government crackdown on the L.G.B.T.Q. movement—which hit its latest target last month, with the closure of a Beijing advocacy group.
Most of the film focusses on Naonao and Patrick, both of whom Xiang was determined to cast as themselves. Naonao shows off his tall and soft-spoken “American uncle” at his Ping-Pong practice, and drags him on an impromptu expedition through the port city of Dalian, after Xiang and Patrick’s relationship is revealed and the attitude of everyone else in the family toward Patrick changes. Xiang told me that he hopes, through Naonao, viewers will come to the realization that many biases are imposed on us by society as we age. “If you like the American uncle, you will like the American uncle, and that’s not going to change simply because of what identity the American uncle has,” Xiang explained. After devouring street seafood, chasing each other through a big empty plaza, and hitting the beach, it’s time for Naonao and Patrick to head home. “It’s also important to me that no matter what happens, you still go home to face everything, and hope to reach some kind of reconciliation,” Xiang said. He told me that throughout the past few years he has indeed been able to do just that.
Sourse: newyorker.com
