Li Sitong is why Dear You works
Li Sitong was a Jieyang finance student when a Douyin search made her the lead of Dear You. The film is already a roughly $291 million hit. September 4 is whether North America learns her name.
Mina Park
In mid-May, Li Sitong changed her Weibo name to Actor Li Sitong. Dear You had been in Chinese theaters for two weeks. She was 22, weeks from a finance degree, and she was done treating the hit like a fluke.
On September 4, Well Go USA, the Texas indie distributor that picked the film up after a June date vanished, puts that movie in North American theaters.
China already knows her face. The campaign here still has to say her name.
How a finance student ended up the lead
Li was born April 19, 2004, in Jieyang, Guangdong, and grew up speaking Teochew. She was a sophomore at Guangdong University of Finance and Economics when Lan Hongchun needed a 20-year-old who already had the language.
Lan is from Chaoshan, the same Teochew-speaking stretch of Guangdong. He had already seen more than a thousand local women.
His team started scrolling Douyin, China's short-video app. The feed served Li. Her parents first checked that he was not a scam.
The part was Xie Nanzhi: a Thai Chinese woman who spends years sending letters and money in a dead friend's name so a family in Chaoshan never has to know he is gone.
He wanted someone who already spoke Teochew at the table. Li had never been on a set. That was the point.
In the movie, a debt-ridden grandson goes to Thailand hunting the grandfather he thinks abandoned Chaoshan and got rich. The man is long dead. The letters that kept arriving were Nanzhi's.
Li plays the younger Nanzhi. Thai actress Usha Seamkhum, the grandmother from How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies, plays her older.
The film already split the role across two faces. A North American trailer will pick one. Watch which.
She claimed the job
Dear You opened in China on April 30. By May 14 she had renamed herself.
She graduated in June and told interviewers she wants more roles, plus training before the next part she loves as much as this one.
Weibo Movie Night in Shanghai gave her a breakthrough-actor prize. China's movie channel later named her best new actress.
The prizes are real. They will not introduce her here on their own.
The vanished June date and the September 4 reset are already their own story.
New York saw her. The multiplex is next.
Li walked the New York Asian Film Festival closer on July 26, then sat for the Q&A with Lan. After the sold-out screening she said emotion can cross languages, whatever dialect is spoken.
A specialty distributor will love that line. The risk is stopping there.
If the campaign is China's nearly $300 million surprise and a feeling that works in any language, her face becomes interchangeable. If it is Nanzhi, people have to learn Li Sitong.
Hong Kong's ASEAN Film Festival screens the film September 19, two weeks after the North American open. Another city. Same question.
Our take
They found her because the movie needed someone it could not invent. A Douyin scroll in Jieyang makes a good origin story. Keeping her name on the title once the tickets are in English is the actual rise.
Watch the trailer stills and the city listings. If her name sits next to Dear You the way a lead's name should, North America met her. If the ads only say sleeper hit, dialect, and family, she stays famous in one country.
September 4 is the first time a market that did not cast her gets to decide if it still needs her.
