Rosemead‘s Lucy Liu talks about the immigrant experience that surfaces in Eric Lin’s award-winning family drama.

When I saw Rosemead at the Bentonville Film Festival back in June, I knew that Eric Lin’s drama, featuring a career-best performance from Lucy Liu, was something special. And so did the festival jury — it went on to win Best Narrative Feature, with Liu winning the Rising to the Challenge Award.

“We were so shocked,” says Liu in our conversation over Zoom. “We did not expect it at all.”

Based on a true story, Liu plays Irene, a woman who discovers her son with schizophrenia has violent tendencies. It’s not only a depiction of what a mother will do to protect her son, but it also intersects with illustrations of our failing healthcare system and the nuances of being a Chinese American immigrant.

“I really understand [her] from a point of view of growing up with immigrant parents and how, especially in the seventies and eighties, how […] racism was just accepted, you know. I guess how people would treat other people. There was a real social class in that sense. And we were definitely on the bottom of it.”

As an action star, Liu is unrecognizable as Irene, small and frail. She says she pulled a lot from that class structure and background in portraying this physicality.

“I wanted to make sure that the physicality also matched the language, and so I started really very much with the Mandarin Chinese and the English that she spoke and how she spoke it was the way into her, her fragility in her body that was deteriorating.”

I had a great conversation with Liu about what it was like to work with director Eric Lin, doing one-takes, and what it was like filming that incredible final scene in the film.

Watch below!