Former Microsoft employee Alice Wu never intended to live in Redmond and work at Microsoft her whole life. Not that she doesn’t love the Pacific Northwest; “It’s so beautiful here,” said Wu. “Every time you come back the sheer beauty of the area just gets to you. It’s inspiring.” No, living in Washington State was never a negative for Alice; it was just that she knew her dreams were going to take her places working as a computer engineer for a software powerhouse never could.

Now living in New York, Wu was back in town to showcase that dream to a packed Seattle International Film Festival audience, presenting the local premier of her Sundance and Toronto Film Festival favorite Saving Face. The movie, the culmination of a five-year dream, is a wonderful Chinese-American mother/daughter relationship dramatic comedy full of parallels to everyday life no matter what a person’s cultural identity. “I’ve been really amazed by the response,” said Wu. “Sundance, Toronto, wherever we take it people keep coming up and telling me how much the film mirrors their own lives. Even though it’s part immigrant story, part coming out saga, it’s ended up being very universal. That’s meant a lot to me.”

Starring the lovely Joan Chen and beautiful relative newcomer Michelle Krusiec, Saving Face is the story of up and coming medical student Wilhelmina Pang, a woman suddenly faced with having to let her newly pregnant 40-plus-year-old mother move into her New York apartment after she’s thrown out of Wil’s grandfather’s (Jin Wang) house for refusing to identify the father. With her life thrown into turmoil, Wil still finds she’s slowly falling in love with beautiful ballet dancer Vivian (Lynn Chen); quickly realizing this affair can only complicate matters more with her silently nesting mother.

“I don’t really see Saving Face as a coming out story,” said Wu. “Sure, that’s an import piece, but the picture is really a love story. Three love stories, really, the most important one being between mother and daughter. Arguably, even the most intelligent and physically capable of us end up being complete and total retards when it comes to love. No one I’ve ever met is good at relationships. It’s something that is absolutely inherently hilarious about us and I wanted to explore that. The thing is, somehow, in the end, we still manage to find one another. That finding is what I [think] is most interesting and wanted to try and explore here.”

Saving Face Director Alice Wu

Still, finding the funding for a lesbian romantic comedy is hard enough, but making one within the world of New York’s diverse Chinese community had to be next to impossible. “When I left Microsoft I gave myself five years to get this script off the ground,” said Wu. “I’d originally intended [Saving Face] to be a novel but ended up writing it is a screenplay instead. It just seemed so funny, vibrant, so different and alive than anything else I’d seen. So I went to New York and said I’d make this movie in five years or not make it at all.”

“It almost didn’t happen. While a lot of people loved the script, it was really hard to get them to want to help get the funding to make it happen. In their eyes there just weren’t a lot of commercial possibilities. [Will Smith’s production partner] Teddy Zee finally helped us get things going. It was his second pass on the project and he was able to help secure us enough to start filming. There was a window for the project and they were willing to roll the dice. We shot the thing over 27 days. No re-shoots, no second chances, things were lined up and we were suddenly off and running. The funniest thing: the five-year deadline I’d set for myself hit the day after the shoot.”

Now that it is all over and Saving Face is a success, wasn’t the filmmaker more than a bit worried as to what her own family would think of it all? “It was kind of nerve-wracking to show it to my own mother,” said Wu. “My own coming out experience was very similar in some ways to that depicted in the film, but even though my mom was very quiet on the subject of my being gay she’s still always been supportive. It might have taken ten years and a bit of estrangement, but we still love one another and even when she was having trouble understanding mom always only wanted what was best for me. That said, I had to be really clear with her about the subject matter [of the film]. I told her, ‘When this comes out, all your friends will know.’ All she said to me was, ‘This is what I want for you.’ God, that’s love!”

In the end, the picture is a bit of a fairy tale, happy endings seemingly finding there way to everyone’s doorstep. It’s a stretch, maybe even taking Saving Face off into a netherworld two steps outside reality, but somehow it still works. Not that the chances it wouldn’t have could have dissuaded the writer-director from taking it there anyhow. “In the end, this is the journey,” said Wu. “It’s important to be able to show our successes. You can’t hold back, especially when it comes to living life or finding love. It’s so rare to see people doing that. Most of us, whether it comes from pressure from our families, our culture, our community or our friends, imagine there is so much out there we can’t have, that we can’t achieve. That’s crap. They can get it, and it was important to me we show that. Most definitely, going out emphasizing love, emphasizing hope, was definitely the right choice.”