It’s time to travel back to 2008 when a teenager is learning about his first love, using the internet to learn about everything, and trying to fit in with the cool crowd. Dìdi (弟弟) is a very grounded film that captures an authentic, slice of life from a Taiwanese American boy dealing with teenage drama. The film is directed and written by Sean Wang, marking his feature-length directorial debut, and stars Izaac Wang (Raya and the Last Dragon) as Chris Wang and Joan Chen (The Last Emperor, Judge Dredd) as his mother.

There have been films that captured social media on the big screen including Searching starring John Cho. With Dìdi (弟弟), Sean Wang focused on what it was like being a teenage boy in the late 2000s with popular social media platforms including Myspace and Facebook. He shares with Nerd Reactor how he brought the look of the UI for these platforms to the film. Additionally, he teases about wanting to do a Joan Wick movie with Joan Chen.

“Well, I think the idea of baking the Internet into the movie was in the DNA of the script, and part of something that could be unique about the movie,” Sean Wang tells Nerd Reactor. “So ever since 2017/2018, anything that I stumbled upon that was from my old Facebook or my desktop that I found that I was like, ‘Oh, this is a relic,’ and I just put it in a folder in my desktop.

“And by the time we were really prepping the movie and actually bringing it to life, I had just like years and years and years of, ‘Okay, this is a Facebook page from 2008. This is like things that were researched. I was like, we needed a reference of what a login page looks like. I was like, ‘I like go look at this folder. This is like the UI Bible.’ And then we had a lot of fun actually, like designing the MySpace pages because back then we were doing HTML, but this time we had professional graphic designers making very unprofessional websites.”

About Dìdi (弟弟)

Synopsis: In 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can’t teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love your mom.

Joining Izaac Wang and Joan Chen are Shirley Chen, Chang Li Hua, Raul Dial, Aaron Chang, Mahaela Park, Chiron Cilia Denk, Montay Boseman, Sunil Mukherjee Maurillo, Alaysia Simmons, Alysha Syed and Georgie August.

The film is produced by Carlos López Estrada, Josh Peters, Valerie Bush and Sean Wang and executive produced by Dave A. Liu, Jennifer J. Pritzker, Chris Columbus, Eleanor Columbus, Robina Riccitiello, Joan Chen, Chris Quintos Cathcart and Tyler Boehm.

Didi is in select theaters this Friday and everywhere on August 16, 2024.