Lucky Lu

Official Selection, 2025 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight
Official Selection, 2025 Toronto International Film Festival

For Lu Jia Cheng, it’s been a day of impossible luck: a new apartment in New York, just in time to show his wife and child flying in from China. It’s been five years of separation while Lu saved every dollar to bring them over. But after his e-bike gets stolen, his only income as a food deliverer vanishes, and Lu’s world suddenly crashes around him. Without a job or rent money, Lu must race against time to find $1200 for a deposit before his family arrives. With everything on the line, Lu wrestles for scraps from pawn shops, former friends, and coworkers, in an unforgiving world of bruised friendships and brutal reckonings. All Lu needs is a bike or just enough cash for one regular day, a pocket of time where he can live a dream.

Superstar Chang Cheng (The Grandmaster, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) plays a man hustling desperately at the bottom of America’s grand pyramid scheme. But Lu is also the quintessential immigrant dreamer-family provider, especially for his daughter Queenie (the scene-stealing Carabelle Mana Wei), whom he tries to protect from survival’s corrosive logic.

Through a story inspired by bicycle delivery workers during COVID, director Lloyd Lee Choi takes us through a New York rarely seen in Asian American cinema–the invisible, fraught world of immigrant gig labor. Produced by Destin Daniel Cretton, Choi’s debut feature draws from his two shorts Closing Dynasty (SDAFF ‘23) and Same Old (SDAFF ‘22) in a searing portrait of immigrant life awash in trickle down precarity, of people rarely noticed yet on the constant brink of complete erasure as they scramble under the monstrosity of the American dream.

– Christina Ree