Lloyd Lee Choi Explores Working Class Struggles in ‘Lucky Lu’

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to make movies, but writer-director Lloyd Lee Choi almost became one on the path to his feature debut, “Lucky Lu,” premiering May 19 at Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes.

“I got into Ryerson University for aerospace engineering at 17, and was on the verge of going, but at the last minute I sort of had an existential crisis,” Choi reveals. “I think a lot of Asian-American kids and kids of immigrants [like me] can relate. It would’ve been a very safe, comfortable life, but it didn’t feel right at all, so I applied to a liberal arts school in Vancouver and ended up living with all the film students in the dormitory. They roped me into helping make student films, and I fell in love with the process.”

Another transformative moment for Choi was randomly finding Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s Brazilian drama “City of God.” Like “Lucky Lu” and his fave filmmakers, the Dardenne brothers, it explores the lives of the working class and “people on the fringes” of society. “It blew my mind and opened the door for me to stories being told outside of my bubble,” he says. Well, not entirely: “My parents had that classic immigrant experience, in terms of coming here without much,” he adds. “They ran a convenience store for years, and my grandfather worked a lot of blue collar jobs to survive, so I really understood that hustle and the deep desire to provide for their kids.”

It all informed Choi’s portrait of Lu (played by 2018 Cannes juror Chang Chen), a New York City immigrant whose fragile existence as a deliveryman falls apart when his e-bike is stolen. In a race against time, Lu searches for his bike and money to pay for a new apartment as his long-estranged wife and daughter arrive from Taipei.

Toronto-raised, Korean-Canadian Choi, who has numerous commercials under his belt, moved to New York a few years before the pandemic hit. “The city was…