A few years ago, director Sing J. Lee was wandering Bolsa Avenue, the main thoroughfare of Little Saigon in the Southern Californian city of Westminster. He ducked into the cafe Chez Rose and found a group of older Vietnamese men playing Chinese chess, or cờ tướng. “It reminded me of my grandparents in Hong Kong,” tells Vogue. “Every family gathering my grandmother would leave halfway through to go play mahjong.”
Lee struck up a conversation with one of the regulars, who eventually shared that the group was more one of companionship than true friendship; they’d gather to play chess, talk, argue, smoke, and drink and then part ways at the end. “A lot of them felt forgotten or left behind, as the city has changed with the generations,” Lee says.
He ultimately found a story for his debut feature that encapsulated this sense of isolation and ad hoc fraternity and took place in that very neighborhood, an enclave of some 200,000 that boasts the oldest and largest Vietnamese community outside of Vietnam. Based on actual events as reported in 2017 in GQ, The Accidental Getaway Driver follows an elder Vietnamese cabbie who finds himself embroiled with three prison escapees. The film doesn’t traffic in tawdry tropes of the manhunt-thriller genre, however; it’s a lyrical mood piece that evinces questions of otherness and masculinity as represented in the unlikely crew.
“I was drawn to the fragility and tenderness of these characters and the opportunity to tell a story of not just the events but how these people came to be and the decisions they make,” explains Lee, who wrote the script with playwright Christopher Chen and won the dramatic directing prize with the film at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023…