Oscar-nominated “Minding the Gap” filmmaker Bing Liu takes his camera from Rockford, Illinois, to New York City with his narrative feature debut, “Preparation for the Next Life.” The Chinese-American doc-maker, who’s worked as a camera assistant on fiction series and films, also uncannily follows in the footsteps of “Nickel Boys” director RaMell Ross in parallel fashion: Liu is adapting a novel (here a 2014 book by Atticus Lish), making the transition from docs to narratives, and also for Plan B, Amazon/MGM Studios, and Orion Pictures
With a screenplay by Martyna Majok, the intimate immigrant romance follows an undocumented Uyghur woman (Sebiye Behtiyar) trying to eke out a life in New York City and escape the hardships she experienced in China. Working in the city’s kitchens, Aishe tries to understand the language and reckon with her Muslim family history, having been trained by her military father. She falls in love with Skinner, a PTSD-scarred Iraq war veteran (rising star Fred Hechinger) who has just returned from three tours in the Middle East.
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A key collaborator on the project, as Liu told IndieWire, was casting director Jennifer Venditti (“Uncut Gems,” “Euphoria,” “The Curse,” “The Rehearsal”), who discovered up-and-coming actor Behtiyar through a SCAD College of Art and Design acting showcase.
“Jen Venditti is great because she’s good at finding the unicorn kind of roles that are difficult to cast,” Liu said. Behtiyar’s character needed to speak three different languages, and the actress was “in her first year of acting for grad school. She didn’t go to undergrad for acting, and we saw her first self-tape, and it was just like, ‘Wow.’ Sometimes, you just see somebody who just has something that’s so watchable and magnetic, and that was very true of her. She has a hard time of not making it real, and so we recognized that right away.”
The film is produced by Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Adele Romanski, Mark Ceryak, and Barry Jenkins, with Brad Pitt, Sophia Lin, and Liu himself as executive producers.
Liu said when he encountered the 2014 book, “At the time, I was so surprised that there was this piece of literature going around town that had a Uyghur character in it,” he said, referring to the Turkic ethnic minority in China and throughout East and Central Asia. “Then I started digging into what her thread is in the book and it just eerily [paralleled] my mom’s life story. My mom also immigrated over here [from China] and started working in Chinese restaurants. We were undocumented for a little while, and she had to choose whether or not to build a life with somebody [in the U.S.],” said Liu, whose family moved from China to the U.S. when he was five.
“The themes of what it’s about are so different from the immigrant narratives I’ve seen captured before,” Liu said. “There’s something about the novel that gets beyond the socioeconomic… [For the film,] the narrow tightrope I walked was: How do I represent this character’s past in her continuation, in her relationship with her family and the place where she comes from, and at the same time, not just have a somewhat myopic view to filter through just the politics of the current moment,” he added, as the Uyghur population has endured human rights abuses under Chinese authority and internment camps at the level of World War II, and rarely publicized in Western media.
Producer Jenkins, at the 2021 National Board of Review gala, championed Liu’s work as the Best Documentary Feature-nominated director of “Minding the Gap” while denouncing an immigrant speech by Donald Trump (via Variety). The two knew each other, though, during the RiverRun documentary film festival, where Jenkins was a jury member and now sits on the board. “I remember he was like, ‘Hey, we should talk. You should think about the narrative space.’”
Liu was told Jenkins was developing “Preparation for the Next Life” as a TV series, but he “went off to do something else. ‘Would you like to take over?’ And that’s when I came on.”
Prior to “Preparation for the Next Life,” Liu was attached to write and direct an adaptation of Ocean Vuong’s novel “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” about a queer Vietnamese American poet grappling with his lineage and personal traumas. That’s not a project Liu is still working on, however. “I developed it for a couple years, and there were creative differences. I’m no longer going to be a part of the project.” IndieWire contacted A24 representatives, who had no comment, though we understand the company is still developing the Vuong adaptation without Liu.
“Preparation for the Next Life” opens in select theaters on September 5 — also the weekend after Telluride, which seems like the best bet for a fall festival launch. Check out more first look images, an IndieWire exclusive, below.
