A new film explores New York’s Chi­na­town through an unlike­ly heroine

On the bus to the casi­no, Sasie Sealy had a vision. ​“I don’t know if you’ve been on one in New York, or if they have them here [in Lon­don], but there are all these bus­es from Chi­na­town that basi­cal­ly take all the old peo­ple to gam­ble,” she explains, ​“They’re super cheap, and they adver­tise in all the Chi­nese newspapers.”

In the vehi­cle, sur­round­ed by ​“a bunch of old grand­mas and grand­pas,” Sealy imag­ined the cat­alyt­ic moment of her debut fea­ture film: a duf­fel bag of mon­ey falling into the hands of some­one it had nev­er belonged to.

From this one scene, Lucky Grand­ma was born. The film is a Coen broth­ers-influ­enced com­e­dy cen­tered on the surly Grand­ma Wong (Tsai Chin), a chain-smok­ing Chi­nese wid­ow liv­ing alone in New York City. Grand­ma becomes embroiled in a Chi­na­town gang war when, on her way back from a bad day at the casi­no, she hap­pens upon a large bag of cash and takes it for her­self with lit­tle hesitation.

When the noto­ri­ous Red Drag­on gang comes call­ing for their mon­ey, Grand­ma hires Big Pong (Corey Ha), a sweet-natured body­guard from a rival gang to pro­tect her. The sto­ry fol­lows the unlike­ly pair through a series of capers through the city’s hair salons, mahjong par­lours, and leisure cen­tres, until Grand­ma is forced to face up to her theft.

Togeth­er with her col­lab­o­ra­tor Angela Cheng, Sealy wrote the script for Lucky Grand­ma in 2013. The text was inspired by soap operas, spoof movies about Hong Kong gang­sters, and Agnès Var­da, and is root­ed in research on tri­ads oper­at­ing in Man­hat­tan in the 1990s. For Sealy, the film’s set­ting is par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant: ​“I feel like Chi­na­town is this almost imag­i­nary place in film his­to­ry; we want­ed some­thing that felt authen­tic, but still a lit­tle mythic.”

Sealy was inspired in par­tic­u­lar by ​‘Sis­ter Ping’, a female snake­head who built an empire worth $40 mil­lion by smug­gling immi­grants into the coun­try. ​“I was just tak­en with the idea of a woman run­ning one of these gangs,” she says, ​“and this idea that she would have a kin­ship with Grand­ma in a way because she’d also be look­ing for respect, and mak­ing her own way.”

When the duo went about try­ing to secure fund­ing for the ven­ture, they ran into prob­lems. ​“Nobody want­ed to fund a movie about an old woman that was most­ly in Chi­nese!” Sealy says, laugh­ing. ​“No mat­ter how fun­ny it was. Peo­ple would love the script, but they just didn’t know what to do with it.”

For a num­ber of years, the project went into hia­tus and Sealy began writ­ing for TV. Then, in 2018, Cheng and Sealy put the script for­ward for AT&T and the Tribeca Film Festival’s ​‘Untold Sto­ries’ pro­gramme and won a mil­lion dol­lar grant to make the film. ​“It was a mir­a­cle. Very lucky.” Sealy winks.

Bring­ing aboard leg­endary actress Tsai Chin as the film’s lead was anoth­er such bless­ing. ​“A good friend of mine had gone to the 25^th anniver­sary screen­ing of Joy Luck Club last year, and Tsai was at the Q&A,” Sealy recalls. ​“My friend called me up imme­di­ate­ly after­wards and said, ​‘She seems pret­ty feisty to me, even though she’s old. I think you should talk to her.’”

Aware of the stig­ma the age of her cen­tral char­ac­ter had attract­ed when pitch­ing around the script, Sealy was wary of cast­ing too old. Indeed, ear­ly reviews have called the deci­sion to even have writ­ten the 82-year-old lead part, ​“a risk unto itself.”

“Wait, who said that?” Sealy exclaims, her expres­sion com­i­cal­ly quizzi­cal. She con­tin­ues good-natured­ly: ​“It was a risk. It was a total risk! Orig­i­nal­ly we were going to cast a 60-some­thing-year-old because it was kind of crazy to make a movie with [any­one old­er], but I just wasn’t find­ing Grandma.”

But with Chin, the con­nec­tion was instan­ta­neous. ​“As soon as I met her I kind of just knew,” shrugs Sealy. ​“We had this epic four-hour din­ner, where she seduced me, or I seduced her – one or the oth­er – into doing this movie.”

Sealy always had a clear idea of who Grand­ma should be as a char­ac­ter. ​“When I roped Angela into writ­ing it with me, we just knew all of these women in our lives that sort of became the same woman, in a way.

“There’s def­i­nite­ly parts of my mom in [Grand­ma],” Sealy con­tin­ues. ​“Angela’s grand­moth­er is in there for sure; a lit­tle bit of my grand­ma, but most­ly the fact she was a smok­er. There’s a stereo­type of these qui­et, sub­servient Asian women. I don’t know where this comes from,” she says, incred­u­lous­ly. ​“They are def­i­nite­ly not in my family.”

Lucky Grand­ma screens at the 63^rd BFI Lon­don Film Fes­ti­val on Thurs­day 10 Octo­ber at 9pm, and again on Sun­day 13 Octo­ber at 6pm.