A Cinematic Love Letter That Redefines the Tearjerker

There is a moment in Dear You that encapsulates its quiet brilliance: an elderly woman, long estranged from the husband who left for Nanyang, learns the shattering truth of his fate. She does not wail. She does not collapse. She simply washes olives, murmuring that “he loved these.” It is restraint of this order—emotional, cultural, and cinematic—that elevates Lan Hongchun’s masterpiece far beyond the weepie it is often mistaken for. This is a film that earns every tear, and it has earned something far rarer: the embrace of a nation. I was in tears for much of the runtime—and so, visibly, was many  audience member around me at my screening, reaching for tissues in collective surrender. Not since Cinema Paradiso at the Cannes premiere have I shedded so much fears in the cinema.

The Humble Behemoth

By any metric, Dear You is a phenomenon. Made on a shoestring budget of approximately 14 million RMB, it has, at the time of writing (June 22, 2026), amassed a staggering box office gross exceeding 1.8 billion RMB. This “dark horse,” which opened with a meagre 1.6% screen share and a paltry 3.77 million RMB on its first day, has mounted one of the most spectacular commercial upsets in Chinese cinematic history, its success fuelled not by spectacle, but by the most potent force in storytelling: authenticity . With its theatrical run extended to June 30 and international release now underway, the film’s 9.3 Douban rating makes it one of the highest-scoring Chinese films of the past decade . The formula, however, is disarmingly simple: tell a true story, with real people, and tell it with integrity.

The Director’s Journey: From Journalism to Cinematic Phenomenon

That this film emerged from the hands of a non-科班 (non-professionally trained) director makes its achievement all the more remarkable. Lan Hongchun, a native of Shantou born in 1986, graduated from South China Normal University with a degree in Chinese Language and Literature, not film. His path to cinema was anything but conventional. After graduation, he contemplated becoming a Chinese teacher in his hometown, but a chance opportunity at Phoenix TV altered his trajectory. There, he spent six years working across various capacities—current affairs commentary, documentary production—and it was this journalistic apprenticeship that proved foundational. “Working in news taught me how to find stories,” he later reflected. “Documentary filmmaking taught me how to understand the love and sacrifice of ordinary Chinese people.”

His first foray into filmmaking came in 2012 with The Love of Swatow (《鮀戀》), an independent feature co-created with university classmates. But it was the “Chaoshan Trilogy” that would define his voice: the 2018 comedy Dad, I’m Sure I Can Do It (《爸，我一定行的》), the 2022 family drama Take Me to See My Mom (《帶你去見我媽》), and now Dear You. Each film marked a deliberate step forward. The first, made with “very elementary skills” and a documentary approach, proved that Chaoshan dialect cinema had commercial viability, earning 47 million RMB. The second became a professional “upgrade,” with two years spent refining the script to address technical shortcomings. “We’ve been learning by doing all along,” Lan says of his creative philosophy. “Each film should show some progress.”

The Art of “Learning by Doing”

Lan’s directorial approach is defined by a singular obsession: authenticity. Faced with a story set in an era he never lived through—his grandparents’ generation of Nanyang migration—he abandoned his previous reliance on personal experience and embraced a method he calls “field research.” For a full year, he and his team interviewed over 120 elderly overseas Chinese, collecting real qiaopi letters, photographs, and oral histories. “90% of the details and plots have real prototypes,” he asserts . In fact, the team visited nearly 300 overseas Chinese families, ensuring that nothing was invented: from the lyrics of the Hakka “Lai lai” soul-returning chant to the texture of a 1950s Thai classroom .

His handling of actors is equally revolutionary. “Empathy matters more than acting skill,” Lan insists. He cast only native Chaoshan speakers, spending nine months searching for the right faces. To coax truthful performances from his non-professional cast, he offered them “unlimited retakes” and even rewrote scenes to align with their life experiences. When filming the elderly Sogriu’s reunion scene, he “stepped back” as a director, using medium shots rather than invasive close-ups, allowing the sheer presence of the 84-year-old Wu Shaoqing to carry the emotional weight. This is direction born not of technical dogma, but of deep human observation.

The Qiaopi and the Director’s Unflinching Gaze

At the heart of this narrative lies the qiaopi (僑批)—the remittance letters and family correspondence that overseas Chinese sent home. In a world of digital ephemera, these physical documents are potent symbols of sacrifice, connection, and a love that must be articulated at a distance. Lan treats these letters not as narrative devices but as sacred artefacts. The film spans decades, following the life of Zheng Musheng (Wang Yantong), a man who travels to Siam (Thailand) to find work, leaving behind his wife, Sogriu, in Shantou. The epicentre of this quiet earthquake is the revelation that, following Musheng’s untimely death, the letters and money that continued to flow home for over forty years were not from him, but from a woman he once helped, the indomitable Xie Nanzhi (Li Sitong). This secret act of devotion turns a love story into a profound meditation on duty and shared humanity.

A Revelation: Li Sitong

Yet the most astonishing revelation of Dear You is Li Sitong, a finance student with no prior acting training, who delivers a performance that rivals—and in some ways surpasses—the finest work of seasoned professionals. As Xie Nanzhi, the woman who secretly sustains a stranger’s family for four decades, Li embodies a moral gravity that feels almost impossibly mature for a first-time performer. There is no actorly calculation in her portrayal; instead, she offers a raw, unvarnished humanity that is as sympathetic as it is formidable.

Watch her in the film’s defining sequence: when Nanzhi finally learns of Musheng’s death, Li does not reach for the expected register of grief. There are no histrionics, no trembling lips, no theatrical collapse. She simply stands in a doorway, her face a fortress of composure, and yet her eyes—those devastating, luminous eyes—betray an ocean of loss. It is a performance of profound interiority, one that communicates decades of suppressed love, loneliness, and quiet heroism through the subtlest shifts in expression. Li makes Nanzhi’s stoicism not a lack of feeling, but its most heroic expression.

What makes her portrayal so deeply sympathetic is its refusal to solicit pity. Nanzhi is a woman of formidable agency—she walks unbowed through fire, she shoulders the burden of another family’s survival, and she does so without ever seeking recognition. Li captures this paradoxical strength: a woman who is simultaneously steel and silk, whose sacrifices are so self-effacing that she becomes almost invisible in her own narrative. And yet, Li’s magnetic presence ensures that we never look away. She transforms what could have been a passive martyr into a quietly revolutionary figure—a woman who rewrites the rules of duty and love on her own terms.

In a film populated by remarkable non-professional performances, Li Sitong is the crown jewel. Her work here is not merely promising; it is fully realised, a debut of such staggering emotional intelligence that it redefines what we expect from untrained actors. One can only hope that this luminous talent continues to grace the screen.

The Young Wife: Zhong Sisi

It would also be remiss not to single out Zhong Sisi (鐘思思), who plays the young Sogriu. Zhong stands as a fascinating bridge—a trained actress whose performance is so deftly understated that she blends seamlessly with her untrained counterparts. She has no theatrical grandstanding; instead, she inhabits the young wife with a palpable ache that is all the more wrenching for its quietude. Her Sogriu is a woman of few words, but her eyes speak volumes—whether watching her husband depart from the village gate, clutching their child in the aftermath of a fire, or receiving letters she cannot read, her face a fragile mirror of hope and quiet desperation. Zhong captures the specific agony of a woman left behind: not the grand gestures of melodrama, but the mundane routines of survival that mask a lifetime of waiting. Her performance is a masterclass in interiority, and it provides the emotional foundation upon which the elderly Sogriu’s devastating later scenes are built.

The Elderly Wife: Wu Shaoqing’s Devastating Truth

And then there is Wu Shaoqing. If Zhong Sisi provides the foundation, the 84-year-old Wu Shaoqing delivers the earthquake. A grandmother from Jiedong who had never acted before, Wu brings to the elderly Sogriu a lived-in authenticity that no amount of training could manufacture. Her face, weathered and etched with the topography of a hard life, becomes the film’s most eloquent canvas. When she finally learns the truth about her husband—that the letters and money she cherished for decades came not from him, but from a woman she never knew—Wu does not perform grief; she releases it. Her tears are not actorly; they are the tears of a woman who has lived this loneliness, who has spent a lifetime waiting for a ghost. The scene is almost unbearable to watch, not because it is melodramatic, but because it is so achingly real. Wu’s trembling hands, her quivering voice, the way her body seems to fold in on itself—every gesture is a testament to a lifetime of silent endurance. At the film’s premiere, she choked back tears, saying, “At 84, I finally have my own name… I am no longer anyone’s daughter, wife, mother, or grandmother.” That confession is not promotional material; it is the soul of the film laid bare. Wu Shaoqing does not act—she simply is, and that is what makes her performance one of the most devastatingly truthful ever committed to screen.

A Subtle Script and a Cinematic Soul

The script, co-written by Lan, is a masterclass in restraint. It does not rely on contrivance or overwrought dialogue. Instead, it finds its power in the spaces between words—in the weight of a letter, in the silence of a woman standing unbowed in a fire (a symbol of Chaozhou women’s stoic bravery), in the melancholy metaphor of the kapok tree, which blooms without leaves, representing a love that is always present but perpetually out of reach. It is a deeply cinematic film, utilising these visual motifs to build a world rich in cultural symbolism, from the “soul-returning” melody of the “Lai lai” chant to the tradition of wearing white at funerals. The film is not just a story but a spiritual history of the Teochew people.

Verdict

Dear You is an epochal film. It is a reminder that the most resonant stories are often the most specific, and that the grandest emotions can be found in the most humble of gestures. It is a near-perfect synthesis of direction, performance, and cultural memory. The fact that this intimate, regional film has become a nationwide phenomenon, connecting younger generations to the forgotten legacy of the Nanyang diaspora, is a testament to its universal power. It is a film that will move you, not through manipulation, but through a profound and aching recognition of the human condition. Prepare to weep, but also prepare to be healed.

Elven Ho