This Bay Area suburb is becoming an indie movie darling

Fremont isn’t necessarily the most likely location to set a film, but the Bay Area city seems to be having a cinematic moment.

Perhaps best known these days as the site of Tesla’s primary California production plant, Fremont is located about 40 miles southeast of San Francisco. It has a population of 220,000, with 62% who identify as Asian, as well as the largest population of Afghan immigrants in the U.S.

Fremont’s Hollywood history dates back to the early 1900s, when the city’s Niles district served as ground zero for the silent film industry (Charlie Chaplin made several movies there, including “The Tramp”). It has provided iconic locations for films like “Terminator” and served as one of the settings in “The Kite Runner,” but it appears that the city is now proving to be fertile grounds for a new generation of independent filmmakers.

Last year’s surprise hit “Fremont,” featuring “The Bear” star Jeremy Allen White, told the story of an Afghan translator who ends up in the city after escaping from the Taliban. This year at Sundance, Fremont made another appearance on the indie film circuit with “Didi,” a coming of age film about a Taiwanese American that won Sundance’s Audience Award for a U.S. Dramatic Picture. 

Directed by Fremont-born filmmaker Sean Wang, “Didi” — which translates to “little brother” — tells the story of Christopher Wang (played by Izaac Wang), a Taiwanese American teenager who struggles to fit in as he enters high school. Wang is as socially awkward as it gets, a hanger-on to more precocious friends who speak with Bay Area slang and pure suburban swagger (one friend is introduced at a party as “the most freshest, flyest Pakistani in all of Fremont”).

Set in 2008 (a year when the director himself was 13 years old), the early era of social media plays a big part in the film, with Wang flirting with his crush via AOL Instant Messenger and eventually turning to early AI chat bot SmarterChild for solace. He eventually gets taken in by a group of skateboarders, becoming their cameraman as they grind the landscape of Fremont business parks, his only escape from the torment of his older sister and high expectations of his family.

It’s a simple premise for a film, but for anyone who grew up in that era, “Didi” will bring back a flood of memories of the melodrama of Facebook walls, the limitless potential of lazy afternoons and the awkward growing pains of boyhood in a suburban enclave like Fremont. The film has yet to receive distribution, but given its rave reviews, expect it to appear in theaters sometime soon.