$2m Chinese Drama Dear You Hits $300m and Heads to Toronto
A family drama made for around $2 million has grossed around $300 million on the Chinese mainland, and it is now travelling the world, The Hollywood Reporter reported on 12 September. The Hollywood Reporter
The film is Dear You, directed by Lan Hongchun. It was shot with a cast of mostly unknown actors and played first to mainland audiences before rolling out in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. It opened across North America on 4 September.
The story follows a debt-ridden young man who travels to Bangkok to find his grandfather in hope of a loan, the Associated Press reported in August. Associated Press It is set among the Teochew immigrant community in the Thai capital. Much of the dialogue is in Teochew, a dialect spoken in the Shantou region of Guangdong province.
That choice is personal for Lan. He said he grew up hearing stories from his grandmother about people she knew migrating to Bangkok. His previous feature, the 2022 film Back to Love, also centred on China's ethnic Teochew community.
At the heart of the film is qiaopi, letters or money sent home from overseas by migrants. For general audiences, think of it as a paper trail of migration. A note. A remittance. A lifeline kept in a drawer.
The run started fast. Dear You topped the China box office over the 15-17 May weekend, when it earned RMB282 million, about $41.5 million, and reached a cumulative $75 million in that market, Variety reported at the time. Variety Later tallies climbed sharply to about $300 million on the mainland.
What makes this stand out is the scale of the turnaround. No stars. No franchise. A regional dialect and a quiet premise about family debt. And then a long, leggy run that carried it into Singapore, Malaysia and Australia before a release in Thailand in early August.
The next stop is Toronto. Dear You is part of a six-feature China Film Showcase with screenings scheduled for 14-16 September at the TIFF Lightbox. The programme is guided by the China Film Administration and hosted by the China Film Co-production Corporation.
The showcase also includes The Lychee Road, a comedy-drama set in the Tang Dynasty and based on a novel about a lowly servant with big dreams, and Big World, which stars Jackson Yee as a boy born with cerebral palsy.
