Lulu Wang is adapt­ing a Hirokazu Koree­da dra­ma for her next feature

By now, it should be clear that Lit­tle White Lies HQ is a staunch­ly pro-Lulu Wang ter­ri­to­ry; we were big fans of her recent fea­ture The Farewell, and she recent­ly graced the cov­er of our food issue, chat­ting with her beau and col­league Bar­ry Jenk­ins about the fin­er points of cui­sine and cin­e­ma. Accord­ing­ly, we’re giv­ing our­selves the rest of the day off in light of the news that Wang’s set her sights on a new fea­ture project with a strong pedigree.

The Observ­er has land­ed the exclu­sive that Wang’s next film will be an adap­ta­tion of the Japan­ese dra­ma Like Father, Like Son, to be script­ed in the Eng­lish lan­guage. To be clear, for those with eclec­tic frames of ref­er­ence, that would be the 2013 pic­ture from Hirokazu Koree­da and not the 1987 body-swap­ping com­e­dy star­ring Kirk Cameron.

In the Cannes-approved fam­i­ly sto­ry, a busi­ness­man learns that his son had been switched at birth with anoth­er child, leav­ing him with a com­pli­cat­ed predica­ment. He’s attached to his unwit­ting­ly adopt­ed son, yet he wants to give his bio­log­i­cal son every­thing the less-priv­i­leged boy has ever want­ed, and he can’t do both. It’s not quite Sophie’s Choice, but it’s still a choice, and a par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult one at that.

Sarah Ruhl will adapt the script for the new take on the mate­r­i­al, the long­time playwright’s first for­ay into writ­ing for the screen. While Wang teamed with bou­tique stu­dio A24 for The Farewell, she will bring her tal­ents to Focus Fea­tures on this next project, which has not yet set a start­ing date for pro­duc­tion. (Who knows when shoot­ing will be safe again, but this could be a fes­ti­val favorite in 2021.)

While The Farewell was not Wang’s debut film – that would be 2014’s lit­tle-dis­cussed Posthu­mous – it did launch her into the main­stream, and it looks like she’s using that cachet in the indus­try to get an unlike­ly project made. Rather than allow­ing her­self to be ground up by the machin­ery of the Mar­vel-indus­tri­al com­plex, she’ll bring the gen­tle human­ism of Koree­da to the grate­ful Amer­i­can peo­ple. The pow­er of auteurism at work, folks!