Film director and screenwriter Alice Wu dropped a two-minute short film announcing OREO’s partnership with PFLAG. According to OREO, for over 100 years, the company has been bringing families together and that’s why in 2022, OREO has decided to partner with PFLAG, ​​​America’s first and largest organization supporting parents, families, and allies with people who are LGBTQIA+.

Wu is known for Saving Face in 2005 and The Half of It in 2020. But her other notable achievements include enrolling at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at 16 years old before transferring to Stanford University to earn a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science. During her feminist studies class at MIT, Wu realized she was a lesbian, according to an interview she did with SF Gate. Wu came out to her mother in Mandarin Chinese while talking about the class.

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The PFLAG and OREO collaboration video is about a young man coming out to his family. First, he reads “The Note” (which is also the title of the OREO short) to his parents before getting ready for his maternal grandmother to arrive. Wu announced OREO’s new PFLAG campaign on Twitter, with a Tweet saying, “Took a Sunday this past March to shoot a little thing for OREO. Hope you like it…”

Wu also had a couple of names to thank for their help on the short film. She continued on, “This was a true labor of love and a great team of people who made it. Just a few names: Editor Christjan Jordan, DP Pat Scola, PD Anne Ross, CD Young-Ah Kim, producers Andrew May, Chris Cho, SKUNK, etc. And great thanks to OREO who was incredibly supportive throughout.”

Alice Wu Used Her Struggles as Inspiration for Saving Face

     Destination Films

Saving Face was Wu’s first film, came out in 2005 and received a nomination at the GLAAD Media Awards. She had to quit her job at Microsoft in Seattle and move to New York to get it made, and the five years of sacrifice were small to the incident that sparked its creation: a struggle to accept her own lesbian identity and the painful falling-out she had with her mother after she came out while at MIT.

Wu told SF Gate, “She was chopping green onions and asked me how school was going, and all I could talk about was that feminine studies class. She asked me what a feminist is, and I gave her some bull – answer, and she said, ‘Well, good, I’m glad, I thought it might mean you’re gay or something.’ … I’m like, ‘Well, I can’t lie to her,’ so I said, ‘OK, put down the knife, let’s sit down, I have something to tell you.’”

She didn’t speak to her mother for another two years. According to the interview, “I got a call from her, and it was like nothing had happened.”