I am grateful to the New York Daily News for giving me the low-down on Alice Wu, director of a new independent film called, "Saving Face." I haven’t seen the film yet but it’s high on my must-see list. Here’s the article from the News:

It’s no surprise that Park Slope writer-director Alice Wu filmed her debut feature, "Saving Face," on the streets of Brooklyn and Queens.

The West Coast transplant always dreamed of living in New York, and seven years ago she finally took the plunge, ditching her computer engineering job and heading east.

"When I first moved here, my mother was horrified that I was moving into Brooklyn," Wu said. "She was like, ‘Why can’t you just move to the upper West Side?’"

But when it came to filming "Saving Face" – a comedy about a single Chinese-American mother and her lesbian surgeon daughter – there was no question where Wu wanted to film.

"It’s about when it all comes crashing together," said Wu, 35, sitting on a Park Slope stoop. "And only in New York can that happen in a few miles."

The film’s protagonist divides her time between sites in three distinctly different neighborhoods – her Park Slope apartment, a hospital in Manhattan and her family’s place in the Chinese enclave of Flushing, Queens.

Some of the things Wu says she loves about New York are the waves of immigration and different ethnic neighborhoods.

"If you go to Flushing, you feel like you’re in Taiwan 20 years ago," Wu said.

The film opened in New York last month and earned a slew of positive reviews.

With a $2 million budget, Wu and her small crew crisscrossed the boroughs during a marathon month of filming.

She transformed the Fay Da restaurant in Flushing into a colorful
temple for a wedding scene. The Masonic Temple in Fort Greene became an
Asian-American community center.

The production team turned a half-finished Clinton Hill apartment near the Navy Yard into an arty loft.

Instead of filming in popular Park Slope, Wu used a brownstone on leafy Kent St. in Greenpoint.

"I love Greenpoint. … I love bacon, and they have all those shops,"
Wu said of the butchers in the predominantly Polish neighborhood.

Of course, there also are some headaches that come with filming in the city.

"They made us keep paying for the MetroCard," Wu said, laughing about a
scene she filmed at Grand Central Station where the main character
keeps passing through the turnstile.

The first-time filmmaker says she received a particularly warm reception from the Asian-American community.

During an open casting call at the Sheraton Hotel in Flushing, hundreds of residents showed up seeking Wu’s autograph.

"I hadn’t even done anything yet," said Wu, who quit her Microsoft job
in Seattle and moved to Brooklyn with a five-year plan to make this
movie. She has a B.A. and an M.A. in computer science from Stanford
University.

"People have a weird idea of New York," Wu said. "But I’ve always
wanted to live here, so I have a certain romance about the city."