Nominated for the Grand Jury Award by the 2011 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (April 28-May 7, 2011), THE LULU SESSIONS will have its World Premiere on April 30th at the Directors Guild of America. THE LULU SESSIONS is a raw and deeply personal documentary with a larger-than-life protagonist. It wrestles with everyone’s biggest fear – how to face the end of life.
“LuLu”, short for Louise, is an incredibly charming and challenging personality who defies all convention. At 42, she’s the potty-mouthed, chain-smoking, no-holds-barred Dr. Louise Nutter, genius cancer researcher and demanding yet beloved professor, though her sweet-sounding nickname has stuck from her childhood days as a former cheerleader growing up on a farm. At 42, she is told she has malignant breast cancer.
The next 15 months—LuLu’s last—are an adventure that rattles her assumptions, values and self-image and tests the limits of even the bond between LuLu and her best friend, the filmmaker. THE LULU SESSIONS, is a film that offers us insight not only into a deeply connected relationship but the beginning of an intimacy between two women that outgrows our understanding of friendship and partnership – and maybe even life. Lulu returns to her family farm for stability and solace but battles resurrected ghosts instead. Dying becomes a process of shedding long-held but stale presumptions, obligations and relationships and forging new ones.
The Lulu Sessions is a powerful, stark testimonial about our capacity for love, friendship, forgiveness and life itself, in the face of impending mortality. It prods us to wonder what our own final adventure will look like. And with whom will we be sharing this last ride.
The Lulu Sessions teaser
More about S. Casper Wong
The LuLu Sessions is the debut feature documentary of director/writer S. Casper Wong. Her Shirts & Skins, a narrative short, was broadcast nationally by the Independent Film Channel and is in the Tribeca Film Institute’s curated Reframe Collection. OO 1, a narrative feature screenplay, received the Alfred P. Sloan Foundations Grant for Screenwriting and Grand Jury Prize for Best Screenplay at Urbanworld Film Festival and was awarded screenwriting grants. Wong is currently working on Staying Well, a feature documentary and television mini-series in collaboration with UCLA about integrative East-West medicine, and Becoming, a longitudinal documentary chronicling Chinese adoptees growing up in American families. Prior to earning an MFA in film directing from New York University, Wong was a senior attorney at IBM.
