Death comes to Chi­na in The Farewell’s first trailer

Per­haps the most glow­ing­ly-reviewed pre­mière at this year’s Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val, Lulu Wang’s heart­felt dra­ma The Farewell has been on cinephile radar for months now. With only a cou­ple short months until the film’s sum­mer release, the time is right for a trail­er, and dis­trib­u­tor A24 has duly obliged.

The public’s first glimpse at the film promis­es a heart­felt look into inter­na­tion­al iden­ti­ty, fam­i­ly, respon­si­bil­i­ty, and grief — and a re-intro­duc­tion to Awk­wa­fi­na, a star capa­ble of much more than she had ini­tial­ly let on.

The rap­per-turned-com­ic-relief (she buoyed both Ocean’s 8 and Crazy Rich Asians last year with her Bronx-bred lev­i­ty) turns lead­ing lady here, por­tray­ing Chi­nese-Amer­i­can mil­len­ni­al Bil­li. She feels all the usu­al ten­sions with her slight­ly more old-school fam­i­ly, torn between the East­ern sense of col­lec­tive oblig­a­tion and her West­ern individualism.

The film explic­it­ly lays out this dichoto­my as Bil­li trav­els to Chi­na on a grim mis­sion: give grand­ma Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen) one final good­bye before she suc­cumbs to can­cer. The only catch, a hook that land­ed this true sto­ry place­ment on pop­u­lar radio pro­gram This Amer­i­can Life, is that Nai Nai’s the only one who doesn’t know she’s dying.

The trail­er takes a somber tone, as Bil­li strug­gles with the choice to keep her grand­moth­er in the dark about the light at the end of the tun­nel. Every­one tells her it’s a cul­tur­al thing, but she can’t quite wrap her head around what feels like a vio­la­tion of per­son­al rights (or even just basic dignity).

Awk­wa­fi­na has already gen­er­at­ed awards chat­ter for her reined-in star­ring turn, tamp­ing down her nat­ur­al instincts for humor and play­ing up raw, ten­der emo­tion. Those keep­ing track of ide­al block­buster coun­ter­pro­gram­ming for the summer’s dog days need look no further.

The Farewell comes to the­aters in the US on 12 July.