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Award-winning documentarian Bing Liu makes his highly anticipated narrative feature debut with Preparation for the Next Life, arriving in select theaters September 5. The first official trailer and poster dropped today, offering a raw and stirring glimpse into a cross-cultural love story rooted in survival, trauma, and unexpected hope.

Based on the acclaimed debut novel by Atticus Lish and adapted for the screen by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Martyna Majok, the film stars Sebiye Behtiyar as Aishe, a resilient Uyghur immigrant navigating the harsh underworld of New York City’s Chinatown, and Fred Hechinger (The White Lotus, News of the World) as Skinner, a troubled American veteran returning from three harrowing tours in the Middle East.

A Love Born in the Shadows

Aishe, trained in discipline and endurance by her military father, flees repression in China only to be swallowed by another kind of invisibility, working long, thankless hours in unregulated restaurant kitchens. When she meets Skinner, their worlds collide in a fragile, makeshift connection born of shared dislocation.

Their romance is not a typical cinematic fantasy. Instead, it’s one forged by exhaustion, loneliness, and the aching desire for dignity in a world that has offered them none. Liu brings his documentary eye to the story’s realism, crafting scenes that pulse with emotional urgency and gritty authenticity.

As the trailer suggests, Preparation for the Next Life is not just about romantic connection. It’s about survival and the yearning for a new beginning. Liu avoids melodrama in favor of stark human truth, capturing the couple’s intimacy against the backdrop of precarity and systemic neglect.

A Creative Powerhouse Behind the Camera

The film boasts a powerhouse producing team that includes Oscar winners Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner (Moonlight, 12 Years a Slave), Adele Romanski and Mark Ceryak (If Beale Street Could Talk), and Academy Award-winning director Barry Jenkins, who serves as a producer alongside Liu. Brad Pitt also lends his name as an executive producer, deepening the pedigree of this ambitious indie drama.

Liu, best known for his searing documentary Minding the Gap, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 2019, continues his exploration of working-class struggle and masculine vulnerability in Preparation for the Next Life. But here, he turns his lens toward the deeply interior lives of outsiders, immigrants, veterans, laborers, rendering them with care and complexity.

A Timely and Human Story

Released at a time when global migration, PTSD, and cross-cultural tensions remain headline issues, Preparation for the Next Life offers a deeply humane counterpoint. It centers those most often ignored, people who live in the margins, who love fiercely even when the world has given them little reason to hope.

Sebiye Behtiyar’s performance as Aishe is already being called a breakthrough, imbuing her character with steely strength and aching vulnerability. Fred Hechinger brings his trademark nuance to Skinner, crafting a portrait of a man whose body has returned from war, but whose mind remains stuck in combat.

Only in Theaters This Fall

With its September 5 release, Preparation for the Next Life positions itself as a powerful contender for awards season. Intimate, poetic, and socially resonant, it’s a film that dares to look where others turn away, offering in the process a testament to the fragile hope that two wounded people might find salvation in each other.

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