The Recipe
Write and Direct by Cici Jingwen Xu
Growing up in a North American Chinese household, teenager Niuniu was raised
between her grandmother’s skilled hands in the kitchen and her mother Jingjing’s
constant absence. Years after her grandmother’s passing, Niuniu still clings to those
early memories in the warmth of handmade dumplings and a kitchen once full of
laughter, while the home she shares with her mother feels colder and more distant.
When a confrontation brings long-buried grief to the surface, Jingjing uncovers her
mother’s old recipe letter and decides to cook for the first time in years. That morning,
Niuniu finds her in the kitchen, and together they begin to fold dumplings with a quiet
understanding that begins to take root.
Director's Statement
I grew up in a household where love wasn’t spoken out loud, but it was always there.
Like Niuniu, I rarely heard “I love you,” but my grandmother would press tangerine peels
into my pockets and wake early to make dumplings by hand. Years later, I began to
wonder what happens when that kind of love, passed down through hands instead of
words, starts to slip away. The Recipe is my way of exploring that quiet loss. It’s about
the distance that grows between generations, especially in immigrant families, where
work fills the space where tradition used to live. This film isn’t about perfect
reconciliation, but the clumsy steps people take, with their hands, with a dumpling, with
a memory. That’s the kind of love I wanted to show: messy, but real.
