Over the past half-decade, a subtle revolution in cinema has shifted coming-of-age filmmaking. Whereas past decades had made significant advances toward making the face of the cinema population more representative, recent movies have stepped further than just representation into investigating the complicated dynamics of cultural identity and between-generation connection. “Aftersun,” “Past Lives,” and “The Farewell” are films that speak to a new artistic direction—where richly personal narratives are used to develop universally accessible emotional resonance in an insistence on situatedness in specific cultural locales.
This new generation of filmmakers eschews the didactic or performative aspects that sometimes defined previous efforts at diversity on screen. Rather, filmmakers such as Charlotte Wells, Celine Song, and Lulu Wang tap into autobiographical sources to produce work that is less statement about identity and more glimpse into the lived-in experience. Their movies don’t so much explain cultural difference as ask viewers to occupy it.
Charlotte Wells’s “Aftersun” (2022) rebuilds a father-daughter holiday from shards of memory and fantasy. The strength of the film is its refusal to give straightforward answers regarding Paul Mescal’s character and depression, echoing the way children usually experience adult pain—as something intuited but not comprehended. By Sophie’s struggles to recreate her father’s inner world through camcorder images and recollection, Wells presents a picture of identity reconstruction that rings true because it recognizes the incompleteness of our knowledge of other persons, even those nearest to us.
The visual style of the film also mirrors this epistemological doubt. Wells often uses strobe lights and surreal cuts that break down the distinction between memory and fantasy. In a powerful sequence, adult Sophie fantasizes about being in a nightclub that appears to be somewhere between the real and the metaphorical with her father. This visual liminality is an ideal metaphor for the way in which cultural and individual histories pass from one generation to the next—not as full narratives but as affective impressions overlaid with our own fantasies.
Where “Aftersun” delves into the individual past, Celine Song’s “Past Lives” (2023) probes how cultural identity evolves over both time and geography. It tracks Nora and Hae Sung, South Korean childhood friends whose lives diverge when Nora’s family emigrates to Canada. Their reunion two decades later is a meditation on the Korean theory of “in-yun”—the destiny-bending relationships between individuals over various lifetimes.
Song’s methodology of cultural identity is revolutionary in its resistance to treating Korean-ness or American-ness as static categories. Rather, identity is something fluid that shifts through relationships and circumstances. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, Nora’s American husband, Arthur, observes Nora and Hae Sung speaking in Korean, recognizing himself as “the stranger in the room” even though he is in New York. This moment reverses the usual immigrant tropes by placing the American in the position of outsider for a moment, but does so without political agenda or resentment—it merely documents the complicated reality of transnational existence.
The film produces moments of untranslatability that are felt to be authentic, not peculiar. When Nora has trouble explaining some Korean ideas to her husband, the movie doesn’t present this as a challenge to be overcome but as the organic texture of a multilingual life. In contrast to previous immigrant stories that tended to present cultural difference as something to be overcome, “Past Lives” shows it as something to be inhabited and negotiated.
Lulu Wang’s “The Farewell” (2019) tackles similar issues from a different perspective, observing how one family travels the cultural gulf between East and West when presented with the news of their grandmother’s cancer diagnosis. According to Wang’s own experience (billed in the film as “based on an actual lie”), the film follows Billi back to China for a hastily planned wedding that is a cover for family members to bid farewell to their matriarch, who is unaware of her condition.
Wang’s success is in the way she frames the ultimate ethical conflict—whether or not to inform Nai Nai of her diagnosis—without demonizing either the Eastern or Western viewpoint. The film doesn’t answer this conflict with a moral judgment but instead allows both positions to coexist at the same time in Billi’s life. By doing so, it provides a picture of cultural identity that is realistic exactly because it is conflicted.
What holds these three movies together is that they are all unwilling to offer clean solutions to the issues of identity. Sophie never really pieces together in “Aftersun” who her dad was. In “Past Lives,” Nora neither rejects nor affirms Korean versus American identity, instead remaining suspended between the two at the same time. Billi never finally settles the tension between Eastern and Western definitions of truth and kin in “The Farewell” but somehow finds a means to honor both.
This refusal of closure is a major development in the coming-of-age narrative. Earlier films of this genre tend to follow a resolution where protagonists find out “who they are.” These newer ones imply something more complicated—that becoming an individual is a negotiation process that continues between personal past, cultural backdrop, and interspecies relationships.
The technical strategies of these films also reinforce their devotion to verisimilitude. Each of the three directors uses naturalistic lighting, handheld camera work during crucial emotional scenes, and acting that values quiet emotion over theatrical catharsis. These techniques produce an aesthetic of immediacy that serves their thematic preoccupations, drawing audiences into lives that seem lived rather than acted.
This emerging generation of coming-of-age film implies that genuine representation is not accomplished through merely including non-mainstream characters but by permitting certain cultural contexts to shape all elements of storytelling—from narrative structure to visual language. Wells, Song, and Wang have made movies that are at once particular and universal, employing the specificity of their cultural milieu not as mere flavoring from the ‘fascinating’ but rather as necessary structures for understanding human experience.
As audiences come to more fully welcome these more subtle explorations of identity construction, the line between “mainstream” and “diverse” storytelling starts to blur. These movies are not sold as first and foremost Asian American or Scottish films but as human stories that are being expressed through culturally particular visions. Their success both at the box office and on the critical circuit implies that authenticity, not universality produced through flattening culture, is the stronger means of speaking across difference.
In shifting from representation toward actual storytelling, these directors have not only widened who we encounter on screen but also how we conceptualize the actual process of becoming ourselves in relation to the cultures and generations that form us. Their filmmaking points toward a cinema where diversity is not an objective to be reached but a fact to be discovered in all its multifaceted, contradictory depth.
