Name Alice Wu Role Film director | Movies Saving Face | |
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Education Stanford University, Los Altos High School Nominations Gotham Independent Film Award for Breakthrough Director Similar People Michelle Krusiec, Lynn Chen, Teddy Zee, Brian Yang, Joan Chen | ||
Alice wu on saving face
Alice Wu (伍思薇) is a Chinese American film director and screenwriter.
Contents
- Alice wu on saving face
- saving face reunion w alice wu joan chen michelle krusiec and lynn chen sfiaaff
- Personal life
- Career
- References
saving face reunion w alice wu joan chen michelle krusiec and lynn chen sfiaaff
Personal life
Alice Wu was born on April 21, 1970 and raised in San Jose, California, eventually moving to Los Altos, California where she graduated from Los Altos High School at the age of 16. She received her B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1990, and her master's degree in Computer Science from Stanford in 1992. Before becoming a filmmaker, Wu worked as a software engineer for Microsoft in Seattle. She then left the corporate world to pursue a filmmaking career full-time.
Career
Wu pursued a career in computer science, but began writing a novel while working at Microsoft. Deciding the story would work better as a film, she signed up for a screenwriting class, in which she penned the feature script Saving Face. Encouraged by her screenwriting teacher, she left Microsoft in the late 1990s to try to turn the script into a film, giving herself a five-year window. Production had begun when she reached the fifth year. In 2001, the script for Saving Face won the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment screenwriting award.
Saving Face was released in 2004 and is her most noted work. The film was inspired by her own experiences coming out as a lesbian in the Chinese American community. She has said that she would like the audience to come away from it "with this feeling that, no matter who they are, whether they are gay or straight, or whatever their cultural make-up is, that if there is something that they secretly wanted, whether it’s this feeling that they could actually have that great love or whatever it is, that it’s never too late to have that. I want them to leave the theater feeling a sense of hope and possibility."
Wu subsequently worked on a film based on Rachel DeWoskin's memoir, Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China. The movie, however, has not made it past pre-production.