If there’s a filmmaker who has really emerged this year it’s Lulu Wang, whose breakout feature The Farewell opens in theaters this Friday courtesy of A24. While the accolades that film has already received are likely just the beginning, Wang isn’t slowing down for anything. Today, Big Beach and Votiv announced Wang’s next feature film a mysterious sci-fi project titled Children of the New World.
Plot details on Children of the New World remain a secret, but the film is said to be an adaptation of Alexander Weinstein’s collection of short stories released in 2016. What we don’t know is which of those stories Wang plans to adapt, or if this will be an anthology of sorts. Columbus director Kogonada is already adapting one, titled After Yang, with Colin Farrell attached to star. Chances are Wang won’t be choosing that one.
Wang’s The Farewell opens this weekend and expands next week. You can read my review from Sundance here.
Here’s the book synopsis for Children of the New World:
Children of the New World introduces readers to a near-future world of social media implants, memory manufacturers, dangerously immersive virtual reality games, and alarmingly intuitive robots. Many of these characters live in a utopian future of instant connection and technological gratification that belies an unbridgeable human distance, while others inhabit a post-collapse landscape made primitive by disaster, which they must work to rebuild as we once did millennia ago.
In “The Cartographers,” the main character works for a company that creates and sells virtual memories, while struggling to maintain a real-world relationship sabotaged by an addiction to his own creations. In “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” the robotic brother of an adopted Chinese child malfunctions, and only in his absence does the family realize how real a son he has become.
Children of the New World grapples with our unease in this modern world and how our ever-growing dependence on new technologies has changed the shape of our society. Alexander Weinstein is a visionary new voice in speculative fiction for all of us who are fascinated by and terrified of what we might find on the horizon.
