Some families say love out loud. This one cooks.
The Lantern Wok is an animated family feature by WJ Cheung, set in New York's Chinatown. After a summer in China learning her grandmother's recipes, thirteen-year-old Jade Ng comes home to a family changed by loss and a restaurant about to be taken — and cooks her way back to her father, one dish at a time.
It is a film about the way some families talk: not in words, but in what gets set on the table. A father who can't say the hard thing slides a plate of cut oranges across a nightstand. A grandmother answers grief by making one perfect bowl of noodles. A daughter learns that a recipe, written down and left where it can be found, is a letter.
The film opens where it ends — at the lantern festival, where fire carries wishes into the sky, and in the kitchen, where the same fire cooks the food. Everything in between is one family finding its way back to one table.
Jade Ng grew up in the back of her family's restaurant, the Lantern Wok — her mother running the front of the house, her father at the stove, cooking so surely he never tastes a dish twice. The summer she turns thirteen, she is sent to her grandmother's village in China to learn where the family's food comes from: the market, the tofu press, the drunken chicken, the candy man who pulls sugar into a thousand strands of silk.
She comes home to a house that has gone quiet, a father who has stopped tasting his own food, and a landlord circling the restaurant. What's left of the family is a tin of handwritten recipe cards — and a thirteen-year-old who has just discovered she can hear what a dish is missing.
It ends the way everything in this family begins: with cooking. A televised junior cooking competition, a rival who becomes a sous chef, and one table set down the middle of the street on the night of the lantern festival — every dish from the tin, the whole neighborhood invited, and the ones who came before fed first.
The Lantern Wok is Mournwell's second feature set in New York's Chinatown — the first, In the Dim of the Night, is a 1982 horror film set below the same streets. One neighborhood, two registers: what waits underneath, and what gets served at the table. Both are written from the inside, on the streets WJ Cheung grew up on.
The writer's father was a chef. This film is how his kitchen sounded.
The screenplay is complete. An animated short set in the film's world — the lantern festival prologue — is in production at Mournwell in a hand-painted watercolor style.
The Lantern Wok is an animated family feature by WJ Cheung, set in New York's Chinatown. After a summer in China learning her grandmother's recipes, thirteen-year-old Jade Ng comes home to a family changed by loss and a restaurant about to be taken — and cooks her way back to her father, one dish at a time. A Mournwell project. Script complete.
The Lantern Wok is the name of the family's restaurant, and it holds the film's central image: at the lantern festival, fire carries wishes into the sky; in the kitchen, the same fire cooks the food. The film opens on a match cut between the two — the flame of a sky lantern becoming the flame under a wok.
WJ Cheung, founder of Mournwell. It is her second feature set in New York's Chinatown — the first, In the Dim of the Night, is a 1982 horror film; The Lantern Wok is a present-day family story told at the dinner table. Both are set on the streets she grew up on.
The screenplay is complete, and an animated short set in the film's world is in production at Mournwell in a hand-painted 2D watercolor style. The script is available to read on request at hello@mournwell.studio.