Selected at the 46th edition of the Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF), in the section Special Screenings, Rosemead by Eric Lin continues a journey already marked by numerous selections in various festivals. After its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2025, it won the UBS Audience Award at the Locarno Film Festival.
Inspired by an article from Los Angeles Times signed Frank Shyong in 2017, the film stars Lucy Liu in the role of Irene Chao, an American of Chinese origin suffering from incurable cancer, and Lawrence Shou in that of Joe, her teenage son suffering from schizophrenia. Marilyn Fu’s screenplay, based on true events, is anchored in the daily life of a family living in the San Gabriel Valley, in Los Angeles, where mental illness, shame and fear mix with tenderness and fatigue.
A story born from silence
The plot follows Irene, owner of a small printing shop which she has run alone since the death of her husband. His son Joe, once a brilliant student and promising swimmer, is gradually closing in on himself. He neglects his studies, cuts himself off from his friends, draws spiders and corpses and develops a fascination with mass shootings. Worry turns to fear when his violent outbursts become uncontrollable.
But before fear, there is denial. Irene initially refuses to see what is imposed on her: the idea that her son could suffer from a mental disorder seems unbearable to her. She convinces herself that it’s just a phase, that he will eventually get better. She silences the attacks, hides the signs, refuses to discuss with the doctor who is treating her son and hopes that everything will go back to “the way it was before”. The film makes this denial visible through everyday gestures: Irene tidies up, cooks, works, as if to preserve a fragile order.
The shame here is as much cultural as it is personal. American of Chinese origin, Irene fears the gaze of the neighborhood, the rumors, the stigma. In his entourage, mainly Chinese-American, discretion is an essential value, and mental illness remains a subject that we prefer to keep quiet. The film shows this community without caricature, through simple scenes – a dinner, an exchange of politeness, an absence of questions – where a set of shared codes and inherited modesty can be discerned. The silence is collective before being individual.
Eric Lin captures this weight of the unsaid with a staging of great restraint. The averted glances, the faces filmed in the darkness, the muffled sounds of a house where words no longer circulate reflect Irene’s solitude and Joe’s isolation. In this enclosed space, the disease becomes an invisible, diffuse presence, which gnaws and confines.
The moment when fear sets in
The film changes when the denial no longer holds. The son’s gestures become disturbing, the silences threatening. Irene understands that the situation is beyond her strength. She begins to fear that Joe will hurt himself or others or even worse. She perceives the possible, unpredictable violence of a teenager she no longer recognizes. And she herself, suffering from advanced cancer, knows that she is increasingly weak.
This realization is the center of the film. It seals the end of the illusion and the entry into a fear that Irene can no longer push away. She knows that she is going to die, that she only has a few months to live, and that she will have to face this growing threat alone. The scenario then sets up a double countdown: that of the condemned mother and that of the drifting son. Two parallel existences, two solitudes that mirror each other.
Eric Lin films this progression slowly and soberly. No big effects, no insistent music, but the breathing of the characters, the noises of everyday life… Fear is born from this accumulation of details and the silence they leave behind them.
A mother between shame and love
Lucy Liu composes an Irene of remarkable accuracy. His refined performance gives this character contained strength. She embodies the dignity of a woman who no longer has a choice, the weariness of one who carries everything without ever asking for help. His face expresses fatigue, fear, tenderness, often in the same plane.
Lawrence Shou, as Joe, conveys the confusion, vulnerability and unpredictability of ill adolescence. The film never tries to judge him. It does not make him a monster, but a being losing his balance, caught in his own distorted perception of the world. This face-to-face between mother and son, dominated by silences and gestures, forms the emotional heart of the film.
The dialogue naturally alternates between English and Mandarin, as is often the case in Chinese-American families. This bilingualism is not a sign of distance, but of continuity: the two languages coexist, one for everyday life, the other for tenderness or prayer. The film uses them without emphasis, as evidence, a cultural anchor which gives the story its truth.
An aesthetic of the unsaid
Trained as a cinematographer, Eric Lin designs each shot to express what words cannot say. The light, soft and diffuse, hugs faces without flattering them. The interiors – the house, the workshop, the son’s bedroom – are filmed as mental spaces, refuges and traps at the same time. The decor becomes an extension of the psyche: everything seems narrow, closed, under pressure.
Violence never explodes, but it imposes itself through signs. The film shows guns, knives, an axe, and blood. The spectator sees, but without spectacle: these elements appear with the same banality as the rest of everyday life. This banality is frightening. It gives the film a continuous tension, where each object becomes a potential threat.
Rosemead advances in fragments, in ellipses. The story sometimes seems suspended, as if reality was slipping through the fingers of the characters. This choice of narration, sober and elliptical, reinforces the proximity with them. The spectator never knows more than Irene: he shares her confusion, her fear, her silence.
A drama about responsibility and loss
Beyond illness and the end of life, Rosemead questions responsibility. That of a mother who knows she is doomed and worries about what will happen to her son after his death. That of a son locked in an inner world, incapable of understanding the limits of his own danger. The film does not offer a solution. He observes. It shows the gestures of survival, the impossible decisions, the words we dare not say.
The tension between love and fear structures the entire story. Irene loves her son, but she is afraid of him. She wants to save him, but she feels she can no longer. This ambivalence, filmed without emphasis, gives the story its gravity. Rosemead does not speak of heroism, but of fatigue and love mixed together, of this blurred line between protection and abandonment.
A film about American society and its silences
The film places this intimate drama in a precise social framework. By evoking Joe’s fascination with school shootings, he refers to the latent violence in American society, the trivialization of danger, the free sale of weapons, including to young people, and the isolation of families. But he does it without frontal denunciation. The threat remains in the background, integrated into everyday fear.
Through this story, Eric Lin and Marilyn Fu address the issue of what goes unsaid in families of Asian origin in the United States, often faced with the shame of vulnerability and the difficulty of asking for help. The film exposes these flaws with restraint, without explanatory speech. Everything happens through silences, gestures, looks.
A first film with a controlled tone
For his first feature film, Eric Lin chooses sobriety. He seeks neither effect nor provocation. Its staging is based on duration, precision of the frame, listening to the faces. This rigor gives the film a quiet strength, where each image seems to contain the weight of the unsaid.
Lucy Liu finds a rare role there, which highlights her depth of interpretation. She carries the film without ever dominating it, giving Irene a silent, human presence, anchored in the simplest reality. The film is rooted in this truth: that of the emotions that we hold back, of the decisions that we do not say, of the fears that we do not share.
A work on the courage of the gaze
Rosemead is less a film about madness than a film about lucidity. The one we reject, then accept too late. It tells of the fear of seeing, the fear of knowing, the fear of transmitting. It is a work about looking away to continue living.
Presented at the Cairo Festival after its appearance at Locarno and Tribeca, Rosemead stands out through his restraint, his attention to detail and his loyalty to people. He does not seek to impress, but to listen. He speaks of shame, fear, love and solitude, with this rare accuracy which makes silence stronger than anything.
Neila Driss
