2026-06-23
How Lan Hongchun Built Dear You
Lan Hongchun did not simply choose qiaopi as a symbolic topic and build a story around it. Dear You grows out of his long-running interest in Chaoshan families, overseas Chinese memory, and cross-border searching.
The starting point: a story that appeared in April 2023
Lan Hongchun said the story of Dear You first appeared in April 2023, and that it took exactly three years from first draft to release. That timeline makes the film feel like a long-developed project rather than a quick response to a trend.
His earlier creative path also matters. When he made Four Seas Flavors in 2019, he traveled through Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia. That experience later helped him return to overseas Chinese families, hometown memory, and emotional distance with more texture.
Fieldwork abroad, family stories at home
Lan Hongchun listened to hundreds of overseas Chinese family stories during fieldwork. These were not isolated anecdotes, but stories across countries, generations, family structures, and migration histories. For Dear You, that gave the search story a much wider emotional base.
The production history is unusually concrete: the team visited more than 300 Chinese families, 90% of the film’s details came from real overseas Chinese stories, the finished film includes 27 qiaopi letters, and the crew traveled more than 80,000 kilometers to find locations and historical materials. Those numbers make the film feel collected from lived experience rather than imagined from a distance.
Qiaopi as structure, not decoration
If family stories give the film its relationships, qiaopi gives it an emotional structure. The Guangdong qiaopi archive entered UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2013, which means the letters already carried cultural and historical weight before the movie used them.
That is why qiaopi never feels like replaceable period decoration in Dear You. It holds together migration, duty, longing, delayed messages, and the possibility that love can survive long silence.
How the family motif enters Dear You
Lan Hongchun’s treatment becomes clearer when Dear You is placed beside Papa, I Can and Take Me to Meet My Mom as part of a Chaoshan family trilogy. He is not visiting this emotional territory once; he is steadily building a body of work around family duty, dialect, hometown memory, and ordinary people carrying heavy feelings.
That also explains why the cross-border search in Dear You feels natural rather than forced. Overseas fieldwork supplies lived experience, qiaopi supplies historical texture, and the family trilogy supplies a stable emotional theme. Together, they turn the film into a story about letters, belonging, and generational feeling.