By Jordan Crucchiola

Before welcoming director Justin Lin to the stage on January 28, senior director of programming Kim Yutani gives the Eccles Theater crowd a brief overview of the filmmaker’s history with the Festival. The last time Lin brought a feature film to Park City it was Finishing the Game: The Search for a New Bruce Lee in 2007. That came five years after the debut of his breakout hit, Better Luck Tomorrow. “Some of you also might know that that premiere screening in 2002 goes down in Sundance history,” says Yutani. “If you don’t know that story, I’m sure it’s on Wikipedia. Look it up.” (Hint: It involves Roger Ebert dressing down a fellow audience member.) Now, after years spent working on flashy television shows and the massive Fast and the Furious franchise, Lin is returning to his independent roots.

“I think what is definitely apparent in this film is his technical finesse and the mastery of his storytelling, and I think this is a remarkable film,” Yutani says to the audience. “It has a sincerity and a sensitivity that provokes empathy for these characters and their world. I can’t wait for you to watch this film.”

Last Days, which is debuting in the Premieres section of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, is a very personal film for Lin. He was passing through an airport in 2018 when he saw the news of John Allen Chau on a CNN broadcast. Chau was a deeply devout Christian missionary determined to convert one of the last uncontacted tribes, the Sentinelese, on an island called North Sentinel in the Bay of Bengal between Thailand and India. Based on the “20 seconds of judgement” he made while watching the report, Lin then went on what he calls “this incredible four-year journey of trying to connect with his humanity.” Chau died on North Sentinel island, and his body has never been recovered.  

“When I first heard [about what happened to Chau], I had a very strong reaction to it,” Lin tells the audience. “This Asian American face popped up, and of course I was imposing all of my personal issues right on top of that. And the last thing that really affected me was that John Allen Chau was 26 years old, and I was thinking, ‘That is somebody’s son. That is somebody’s brother,’ and it really stuck with me.” With a story still surrounded by so much mystery, and with Chau’s life ending in so much controversy due to his mission work, Lin started scrutinizing the details of what was known about Chau’s experience — like when the young man wrote about moments of divine intervention in his journals, which Lin was hesitant to accept as reality. But as Lin got further and further into the project, his directive became focusing on Chau as a subjective narrator, rather than presenting Chau as a historian chronicling the objective truth of his experiences.

“I thought it was going to be a really interesting exercise for me to stop questioning it, and really start examining him as a storyteller,” says Lin. “It was very evident that he was influenced by adventure novels and Hollywood films. So we went down this path of developing it and using certain genre devices to connect the gaps.” For the lead actor of Last Days, Sky Yang, his personal mandate for playing Chau was to humanize someone who had become a kind of inscrutable myth. “I saw some of the things that people [said] online about him, and I think everyone deserves dignity, regardless of if you align with their worldviews or not,” explains Yang. “So, we just went around and around trying to understand and humanize someone who hadn’t been offered dignity in his death.” 

The actor even traveled to Oklahoma where Chau went to college and spoke with people who had known the young man before his mission work started. Yang tells the audience, “I’ve never been welcomed with more generosity in any place, ever. That was absolutely extraordinary, and it flipped on its head every preconception I had about that place, and what that place might be.” Yang continues, “I really found family there. I really found friends there, and I think you can’t help but empathize with people when you sit down and break bread with them. That’s something we need more of.”

Although it’s been nearly two decades since Lin played at the Sundance Film Festival, it’s clear that being in Park City is a kind of homecoming for the filmmaker. “It’s been 23 years since I was in [this] same exact building when Better Luck Tomorrow premiered,” Lin says. “It really changed my life, and I went on this amazing journey. To be back with an independent film, I can tell you for a fact that for any independent film, this is the pinnacle.”