A surprising insightful film is Lloyd Lee Choi’s Lucky Lu – an unassuming debut film by a Canadian director which is more than the genre of poverty porn or melodrama. Choi’s film is more complex that many other films and it embodies the spirit of its protagonist in shaping the story. The film opens with Lu (Chang Chen) working as a delivery bike rider and after years of delivering takeout to the most ungrateful in NYC, he scrounges around enough funds to move into an apartment with his wife Si Yu (Fala Chen) and daughter Yaya (Carabelle Manna Wei). Si Yu and Yaya are flying in from China, and as Lu gets the small New York apartment in order, it’s touching to see him open up in anticipation of their arrival. The apartment has no view but there is one window that allows him to see the morning sunlight reflected off the adjacent building.
Lucky Lu is the debut film by Korean-Canadian director Lloyd Lee Choi. Adapted from Choi’s 2022 short film Same Old. Lucky Lu premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight section of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Here at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, Lucky Lu has three showings: Wednesday, January 7, 2026, 7:45 PM at the Mary Pickford 9; Thursday, January 8, 2026, at 4:30 PM, at the ARCO Theatre (Palm Canyon Theatre); Sunday, January 11, 2026, 12:00 PM, at the Festival Theatres 3. For tickets and more information, go to: https://psfilmfest.org/film-festival-2026/film-finder/lucky-lu.
Of course, new beginnings are rarely promised, especially to those who’ve earned them and needed them the most, and after a restaurant takes a little too long to prepare food for pick-up, Lu discovers his bike has been stolen. He races against the clock to get his bike, which is tied to his source of livelihood, and the film expands out from that point to encompass the rude awakening he and his family will go through in trying to make their dreams come in America.
Luck is a peculiar concept. Winning the lottery is lucky, but so too is it the traditional thing to say when the bus that could have killed you merely breaks every bone in your body. Lloyd Lee Choi’s compassionate, absorbing, sometimes agonizing Lucky Lu deals exclusively in the latter type – the tough luck of the narrow escape and the near miss, which doesn’t manifest in sudden windfalls but in the paltry miracle of bad circumstances not being so much worse. Whatever lucky star Choi’s characters must thank, it’s a dim one, usually obscured by clouds and skyscrapers.
Everything feels muted and shot in an overcast light by cinematographer Norm Li, as if the city is constantly slumbering After five years of separation from his family back home, he has scraped together enough money to rent a small apartment, which his friend Bo Hao (Haibin Li) is passing on to him. So, Lu has sent for his wife Si Yu (Fala Chen) and little daughter Yaya (Carabelle Manna Wei) who have just received their papers and are flying in the next day. Lu is the stoic type, but there’s palpable anticipation in his manner as he gives them a Facetime tour of their new digs. Yaya has heard that all American families have a dog. Lu points his phone at the foggy unplugged aquarium and promises her a fish instead.
The first blow for Lu falls while Si Yu and Yaya are flying from China to the United States. Lu discovers that Bo Hao has disappeared after pocketing his deposit and rent payment rather than delivering it to the landlord as promised. He is given a day to come up with that amount again, or his family will be arriving to no home at all. The second cruel development occurs when Lu’s bike – now his only means of paddling out of debt creek – is stolen while he’s making a routine drop-off. Unable to work, Lu pawns, begs, cajoles and eventually resorts to petty theft himself, but it hardly makes a dent. Then his wife and kid arrive.
Lu’s increasingly desperate trail around New York with his solemn-faced little girl in tow becomes a kind of odyssey against adversity. Lu tries to keep all his worries from Yaya (or Queenie as she has chosen to be called in America) who is more observant than he realizes. But as the plot tightens, Choi’s compassionate script ensures that even those individuals who have most injured Lu are not so much villains as fellow victims of a system that oppresses by pitting them against one another. Even Bo Hao, whom Lu eventually tracks down, is revealed to have committed his betrayal only to pay his gravely ill mother’s medical bills. “Did you know they charge for the ambulance here?” he asks.
Brendan Mills’ excellent editing, in changing mood from the jittery, quick-cut, handheld first half to a steadier, more contemplative last act as Lu’s treks across the boroughs become longer and slower and exhaustion begins to set in. In this latter mode, though, there is also space for sudden moments of lyricism. In particular, in one lovely, deeply moving passage we follow Lu but hear in voiceover a monologue from Auntie Yang, an old friend who is taking care of Queenie while Lu runs another hail-Mary errand. She describes how close they all used to be and how different Lu was when he first arrived, with the ambition to open a restaurant that they all invested in, before it failed.
The wonderfully restrained turn from Chang Chen, the Taiwanese star of major films from Edward Yang, Ang Lee, Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Wong Kar-Wai. There is no showboating here, just a profound investment in the humanity of a character who barely allows himself a moment to be human, let alone to ponder his luck
