Sen-I Yu’s debut feature offers an intimate yet glaring lens into the lives of immigrants in New York

by Anyu Ching for Winter Film Festival
See the feature film My Heavenly City on February 22 @2:25PM at LOOK Cinemas (657 West 57th Street) as part of New York City’s 13th Annual Winter Film Festival. Tickets now on sale!

Three interrelated stories about life as transplants in New York City: A lonely Mandarin-English interpreter who witnesses the suffering of others, gains new perspectives on her own life; two young hip-hop enthusiasts who become disenchanted by their New York adventure, find tender love within each other; and a middle-aged couple struggles to keep family intact as they cope with their mentally ill young son. Three sets of characters connect and inspire one another in their journey to find hope in this heavenly city.

“In this big city, everyone has places to be, people to see, and a home to go to. Sometimes I feel like I’m floating in the air.” This poignant sentiment, uttered by one of the film’s protagonists and repeated throughout My Heavenly City in both phrase and feeling, acts as an unbroken channel into the very heart of Sen-I Yu’s debut feature, which offers an intimate yet glaring lens into the lives of immigrants in New York City.

A triptych with elements reminiscent of Milcho Manchevski’s Before the Rain (1994) or Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women (2016), My Heavenly City twists together themes of loneliness, purpose, and mental health through three loosely interconnected chapters. The result is a raw, multi-colored tapestry of the Asian immigrant experience in which Yu acts as both the weaver and the weaving itself.

The New York-based Taiwanese filmmaker originally conceived of My Heavenly City as a short film of the same name centered around Mavis (the subtly brilliant Vivian Sung) and her experience as a Mandarin-English interpreter. The idea for this original short partially stemmed from Yu’s own experience working part-time as a legal interpreter while attending New York University’s Tisch Graduate Film Program.

Yu details the difficulties of the job to me, explaining that it did not matter that the situations in which she was interpreting were not her own; that to relay someone else’s suffering was to bear the weight of that pain. We see Mavis grapple with a similar struggle when recounting a woman’s horrific subway incident, and later, she is further haunted by flashes of it during her train ride home. “To witness other people’s suffering is hard,” Yu says. “But you learn about life that way.”

However, due to the lack of adequate funding brought on by the notoriously niche nature of the short, Yu was forced to reexamine—and subsequently expand—the narrative structure of My Heavenly City to include two additional storylines: “Jack & Lulu,” a love story about two like-minded college students finding romance and meaning through hip-hop; and “Kite,” irrefutably the heaviest and most affecting chapter of the three, concerning a married couple and their mentally ill son.

Most of these characters, like Yu herself, hail from Taiwan and are inspired in part by real experiences that either Yu or the people close to her have undergone. “I feel like it has sort of become my calling to make movies about people who are in-between,” Yu reveals tenderly. “For all the transplants who… for whatever reason have to set their dreams in another country or city.”

New York is home to one of the largest Taiwanese communities in America, with immigrants constituting 38 percent of the city’s total population, according to the most recent report conducted by the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. Yu’s characters grapple with crises emanating from, or at the very least exacerbated by, their status as international students, young professionals, or middle-aged parents in a city that is, at times, heavenly but more often than not, far from it.

“You always think about who you are, and where you want to go,” the writer and director reflects on the liminal space that many of her characters inhabit. “Do you go home or do you stay, and where is home? I think those are the questions that so many people in different stages of life ask again and again and again.”

My Heavenly City deftly conjures up the uncertainty and restlessness, the abject loneliness and pernicious doubt, that plague the lives of those Yu affectionately terms “transplants.” On screen, these nuances are captured through the use of diegetic sound, natural light, and hand-held ARRI ALEXA Mini footage. The combination of these elements, alongside Yu’s honest and heartfelt dialogue, creates an almost overwhelming—though uniquely visceral—experience for viewers that typically can only be ascribed to documentary or otherwise autobiographical films.

“For me, the more real, the better,” Yu states. Indeed, My Heavenly City does not concern itself with appearing sheen as much as shining a naked bulb to the authentic Asian immigrant experience in the hopes that somewhere amidst Yu’s unadorned mise-en-scène, audience members may even catch a glimpse of themselves.

Set and shot during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2022, the filming process was not without its fair share of complications. The pandemic, and the anti-Asian racism that was born in its wake, resulted in multiple reshoots and recasts, even leading to one main cast member (Chun-Yao Yao) receiving additional doses of an entirely different, FDA-approved vaccine due to his original Taiwanese vaccine not being federally recognized. “I felt like [he] was going to become Wolverine,” Yu jokes.

Despite this, there is little that roots Yu’s feature in that seemingly everlasting era. My Heavenly City has one foot in and one foot out the proverbial COVID door. Her characters occasionally don face masks, yet seemingly make no other lifestyle changes. And apart from a brief “Stay positive, test negative!” holler and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of a STOP ASIAN HATE street mural, the events of the film might as well have taken place a decade ago. Or a decade from now.

This irresolute approach, however, once coupled with Yu’s timeless narratives, may have worked to lend the film an unexpected air of immortality. Hence, My Heavenly City is able to transcend the prevailing limits of period-specific storytelling and instead unfold—with great care and equal comfort—a perennial world where time is forever and place is, as always, New York.