China student discovered on video platform shines as heroine in acclaimed film ‘Dear You’
Recent graduate Li Sitong hopes for more acting roles after starring in emotional telling of a decades-spanning secret involving a stranger
When 'Dear You', a low-budget Teochew-language story of migration became one of China’s biggest films in late spring and early summer, its lead actress Li Sitong, who played Zia Lamgi, became a university graduate and said she wished to continue her acting career.
The film directed by Lan Hongchun tells a story of a young Teochew man travelling to Thailand to search for his estranged grandfather Ten Baksheng, and ending up discovering that he had long been dead and it was his friend, Lamgi, who sent love letters to his wife Iap Sok-jiu, for nearly two decades.
The film was produced for a reported 14 million yuan (US$2 million), and has taken nearly 2 billion yuan at the Chinese box office.
Not only did Teochew people resonate with the film, reliving their family memories that also involve a diaspora and remittance letters called qiaopi, young Chinese across the country were moved by the story.
One commented Dear You was “the best Chinese film in the past five years”.
Li, who delivered a critically acclaimed and natural debut performance as the independent innkeeper’s daughter, Lamgi, has earned widespread praise for bringing the character to life
Lan scouted the first-time actress on social media after reportedly interviewing over 1,000 young women for the role. Dissatisfied with the initial auditions, he and his casting team searched a short-video platform for “20-year-old local Chaoshan women,” successfully training the algorithm to recommend their ideal Lamgi.
There they discovered Li, a native of the Chaoshan (Teochew) region in southern China’s Guangdong province, a second-year student in financial engineering at the Guangdong University of Finance and Economics.