After filmmaker Bing Liu returned home to Chicago from a Colorado film festival in 2018, a package arrived from “Moonlight” director Barry Jenkins , who’d met Liu there and told him to stay in touch.

“He was on the jury,” Liu says of Jenkins’s role at the Mountainfilm Documentary Festival, where Liu’s debut film “Minding the Gap” won a pair of awards on its way to an eventual Academy Award nomination for best documentary feature. “He was like, you should do narrative. And eventually he sent me this book.”

The book was Atticus Lish’s 2014 novel “Preparation for the Next Life,” and as Liu turned the pages, he grew more and more excited.

Aishe is an undocumented immigrant from China’s Uyghur minority, scraping by doing off-the-books jobs in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens. Sk

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