Chinese director Lan Hongchun's film "Dear You," a low-budget picture spoken almost entirely in the Teochew dialect, has become an unexpected box office phenomenon in China, grossing far beyond expectations and closing the 25th New York Asian Film Festival. Made for just RMB14 million ($2.1 million), it has become the second-highest-grossing film in China this year behind "Pegasus 3," taking in $285 million domestically plus a further $6 million internationally, demonstrating that dialect-specific storytelling can achieve mainstream success given strong material.

The film centres on Xiaowei, a young man from Chaoshan who secretly travels to Thailand to trace a grandfather who cut off contact with the family decades earlier, uncovering a story rooted in the 1950s Chinese diaspora community in Bangkok. It is built around qiaopi, the historical remittance-letter system in which illiterate overseas labourers relied on scribes and readers to compose and relay messages home, requiring at least four people per letter and creating scope for miscommunication that Lan says inspired and drove the entire narrative. Lan, who directed, wrote and edited the film, says his best-case projection had been RMB100–200 million ($14.8–29.5 million), roughly a tenth of the current haul, which he now estimates could reach RMB2 billion ($295.5 million) and is still climbing; co-star Li Sitong, making her film debut, said she was "very surprised" by the response after around three months of promotion.