Based on a 2017 Los Angeles Times article by Frank Shyong, the new movie Rosemead dramatizes a true and tragic story of a single Taiwanese American mother named Irene (Lucy Liu) who has cancer, and her teenage son, Joe (Lawrence Shou). A star student and swimmer, Joe begins to have increasing symptoms of his diagnosed schizophrenia, which intensify after the passing of his father (Orion Lee). As Joe’s hallucinations, delusions and outbursts become more frequent and intense, Irene struggles to support her son while dealing with her own terminal illness. If the premise of director Eric Lin’s feature debuts sounds bleak, that’s because it is.

Whether in the form of teachers, social services, or cultural shame, Rosemead highlights how external actors repeatedly fail Joe — driven not by

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