The Joy Luck Club

In 1993, we had no way of knowing just how historic the world premiere of The Joy Luck Club would become. Wayne Wang's adaptation of the Amy Tan bestseller brought together a terrific cast of eight Asian American women to take rare lead roles in a Hollywood studio movie. For the next quarter century, independent films and films from Asia would fill a void of under-representation — but so would repeat viewings of The Joy Luck Club in countless homes across North America. We're thrilled and honoured to present this special 25th-anniversary reunion event in the same Elgin Theatre where it all started.

Original 1993 Festival programme note (abridged):

Amy Tan's bestselling novel, The Joy Luck Club, has been turned into the kind of sweeping emotional epic many people associate with classic Hollywood films. The story focuses on June, a young Chinese-American woman whose mother, Suyuan, has just died. Suyuan's three closest friends — who form the mahjong group known as the Joy Luck Club — decide to honour their late friend's fondest wish by pooling their savings to send June from San Francisco to China for a reunion with her long-lost sisters. It is during the bon voyage party that June, her three "aunties" and their three daughters unleash the complex flow of memories that become the real voyage of the film.

Director Wayne Wang and screenwriter Ronald Bass do a brilliant job intercutting among the eight main characters, exposing complicated mother-daughter conflicts. The storylines reach back to grandmothers in China, and forward to great-grandchildren in America.

Paramount among the many pleasures of The Joy Luck Club is the superb ensemble cast. Like the great cycle of studio women's pictures of the 1930s and '40s, [Wang's film] embraces humour, melodrama, sentiment and style in the service of a story that unabashedly celebrates [both] the struggles and triumphs of its heroines.