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The Wedding Banquet had just played at the Eccles Center, the largest venue at the Sundance Film Festival, in Park City, Utah. And as writer-director Andrew Ahn was brought onto the stage, the audience of 1,200 gave a rousing standing ovation.

This was Ahn’s fourth time at Sundance. He screened his short film Dol in 2012, his feature film Spa Night in 2016, and his episodic series This Close in 2018 — but this was a special experience. The Wedding Banquet was a remake of the first gay movie Ahn had ever seen — one about a marriage proposal and wedding — and he had been nervous to premiere it in front of his boyfriend. The stakes couldn’t have been higher for Ahn, but it all paid off.

As Ahn thanked the audience, there was a palpable magic in the room, and that magic was just as present throughout the film and on the set when they were making it.

The Wedding Banquet is a modern reshaping of Ang Lee’s classic 1993 film of the same name, this time focusing on Min (Han Gi-chan), a Korean immigrant who devises a plan to marry his lesbian friend Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) in order to get a green card after his commitment-phobic boyfriend, Chris (Bowen Yang), rejects his proposal.

While the setup is farcical and the laughs are plenty, the film also has a huge heart and a much-needed message about the strength and beauty of a chosen family. It’s a career best for Ahn, who had a hit with his gay romantic comedy Fire Island (also starring Yang) in 2022.

Ahn’s new version of The Wedding Banquet doesn’t only feature a gay couple like the original; it also has a lead lesbian couple, played by Tran and Oscar nominee Lily Gladstone.

Kelly Marie Tran, Lily Gladstone, Han Gi-Chan, and Bowen Yang in The Wedding Banquet.Luka Cyprian Bleecker Street

The movie additionally shifts part of its focus to the matriarchs of the families, with Angela’s mother (the brilliant Joan Chen, once again playing the mother of an Asian American lesbian after 2004’s Saving Face), and Min’s grandmother (Oscar-winning Youn Yuh-jung) taking central roles. They help Min and Angela put on their farcical wedding for the sake of Min’s talked-about-but-never-seen grandfather.

Ahn says he wanted to stay away from having a homophobic villain and “ultimately wanted the drama of the film to come from characters who love each other too much, who care for each other so much that it leads them to bad places or silly decisions. And so it organically became more about these matriarchs.”

One of the results of adding a lesbian storyline was Tran finding a queer community on set that made her comfortable enough to come out publicly, something Ahn calls “the honor of a lifetime.”

In the film, Angela’s mother is an overeager ally, though her public support hides the fact that she doesn’t know how to talk directly to her daughter. Tran gets emotional when she talks about filming scenes with Chen, which she calls “so personal to me.”

Tran says she lives in a pretty progressive bubble, so she assumed it wouldn’t be a big deal when she came out to her parents. But then what she thought would be a 10-minute phone call turned into a long and difficult conversation.

Joan Chen in The Wedding Banquet.Luka Cyprian Bleecker Street

“Even as an adult, there’s still a little bit of little you in there. And little you is always going to want the approval of your parents,” she says. “Having to recognize that, ‘Hey, I’m an adult now, and maybe I don’t need that recognition,’ and am I able to live with that? It’s a complicated experience. So I hope that anyone else who has experienced that is able to see themselves in this movie, because I can tell you with my entire soul that I really feel like I poured all of my emotions into it.”

That’s just one example of the magic that was present throughout filming. Yang, who plays the jaded millennial Chris, also experienced healing through working on the film. He first saw the original Wedding Banquet around college, when he and his parents were going through “a very tough time” in terms of his coming-out.

For Yang, the comedic but “somewhat tragic and bittersweet” ending of that film gave him a lot of complicated emotions, and he says that going back and watching the original when he started working on this version “was the perfect thing to remind myself that I had developed personally in a very unexpected way.”

“Now my parents and I are on wonderful terms, and they embrace my queerness, and I never thought that would happen,” he says. “And I feel like the movie is sort of this benchmark for me emotionally for how far we’ve all come as a family.”

Yang provides plenty of laughs in the film but also does a great job in dramatic moments, like in one of the film’s emotional-support-beam scenes where Chris’s nonbinary cousin Kendall (Bobo Le) reminds him that he needs his friends because “none of us are good enough alone.”

That line, which gives the film much of its magic, was a last-minute script addition, Ahn says, inspired by the chemistry Le and Yang shared on set. At first Le’s character was supposed to be just Chris’s friend, but after meeting Le, Ahn had the idea to make them Chris’s cousin, with Chris as a queer father figure.

Kelly Marie Tran, Lily Gladstone, Han Gi-Chan, and Bowen Yang in The Wedding Banquet.Luka Cyprian Bleecker Street

Ahn says that as personal as the film is to him, “it was such a group effort” and “that the film is better because of all my collaborators.”

“So it was a little meta in that way where I was like, ‘Yeah, none of us are good enough alone.’ These movies are better because of this collaboration,” he says. “People are better because of their families, their chosen families, and so I just really wanted to celebrate that in that moment and in the film.”

The movie’s magic touched Yang one other time, in the form of a bird he saw when he was preparing for the role (Chris is a birding guide). Yang was in the Vale of Cashmere area of Prospect Park (a famous historic cruising spot) in the weeks before shooting with a pair of binoculars when he heard “this scuttlebutt, all these whisperings like, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s a scarlet tanager today. There’s a female scarlet tanager today.’”

Yang says the moment “felt so silly and cute and lovely.” When he found the bird, which he describes as “an adorable red bird” and “beautiful” in his binoculars, it “was this thrilling moment where I was like, ‘Oh, I think I get why people love this.’”

If nothing else, Yang jokes that he hopes The Wedding Banquet will inspire more queer birders. Ahn has loftier goals. Just as Lee’s Wedding Banquet helped inspire Ahn, Ahn knows that he is “a part of a legacy of queer filmmakers.”

“I really sincerely hope that this film can make an impact on other filmmakers to make their films,” he says. “And that audiences get to see all the queer stories that our community holds.”

The Wedding Banquet debuts April 18 in theaters.

This article is part of the Out March/April issue, which hit newsstands April 1. Support queer media and subscribe— or download the issue through Apple News, Zinio, Nook, or PressReader starting March 20.