Filmmaker Gillian McKercher on fathers, daughters and second-gen immigrants

At its core, Gillian McKercher's latest film Lucky Star is about families—how they stay together, how they fall apart and how they do it all over again. It explores addiction, second-generation immigrants, redemption and deceit, all set against the backdrop of a chilling Calgary winter.

The idea for the film began with a simple premise: a student caught cheating and her parents doing everything in their power to keep her from being expelled. But as McKercher developed the story, her focus shifted. 

“I became interested instead in what sort of dad would want to cover for his daughter,” she says. “I wanted to ask: What would a father who feels like a failure do? How could you still love a dad who screws up so much?”

The audience is introduced to Lucky (Terry Chen), a reformed gambler who lives with his wife, Noel (Olivia Cheng), and their two daughters. Lucky—already hiding a slew of outstanding bills from his family—falls victim to a tax scam, which pushes him to his limits and into old habits as he scrambles to find the cash he needs.

Meanwhile, the other members of this unassuming Chinese Canadian family have secrets of their own. Noel pockets a watch left behind by a customer at her job, while their eldest daughter, Grace (Conni Miu), cheats on her final exam before graduation. Grace feels the pressure of her parents’ finances, and it only heightens when Lucky grows desperate enough to ask her for money. 

Part family drama, part borderline thriller, McKercher balances heartwarming—and wrenching—scenes between daughter and father, with Lucky’s high-stakes gambling, both with his money and his relationships. At every turn, Lucky seems to make the wrong move. His name isn’t necessarily ironic—it’s not a lack of luck that brings him misfortune but really just his own decisions.

“I did want people to dislike Lucky, but I still wanted us to understand why kids would stand by their dads no matter what,” McKercher tells me.

McKercher describes passed-down stories of the men in her family gambling while their mothers, wives and daughters held everything together. She wanted to bring this dynamic to her story—a family loving each other despite it all.

“Can we believe that Lucky can be a better man?” she wanted the film to ask. “Or is it just that we don't want to even let ourselves be disappointed because it's already so disappointing?”

This film plays out in McKercher’s hometown of Calgary, with its snow-covered highways and barren trees. For McKercher, the setting wasn’t just a backdrop—it was inextricable from the story she was trying to tell.

“I had to set it in Calgary so a family with this income level could afford a detached family home. That was critical to me,” she says. “I love the driving element of Calgary. You can’t go anywhere without driving. It’s so beautiful and stark in winter.”

McKercher’s fondness for the city bleeds through every minute of the film, with contrasting shots of the stark outdoors and the warmth of the family’s lived-in home.

“I liked the idea of this guy trying to make the best of it in a city like Calgary, in the dead of winter, in a suburban gambling house,” she says. “It just felt so relatable in a way. If we didn't set it in Calgary, I don't think it would have come across as effectively.”

Along with being all Albertans, the main cast members are also all Asian Canadian.

“When I was creating the world that they were in, it was just really drawing on my own experience living in Calgary,” says McKercher, who is a second-generation, biracial Chinese Canadian. “Going to Chinese school every Saturday and seeing other families there every week, (watching) my cousins who do lion dance at that gym that you see in the film and then seeing the same families there too.”

The snippets of Chinese culture throughout were purposeful but subtle.

“I was extremely adamant from the beginning that I don't educate people on Chinese culture—it just is,” she tells me. “I didn't want to have any scene where you have a character explain Chinese culture. That sort of educational approach is for other filmmakers, not for me. I just wanted it to exist in situ, (to show that) this is just how they're living.”

With Lucky, McKercher also highlights an often-overlooked narrative in the ever-growing realm of Asian diasporic media: second-generation immigrants navigating a unique tension between heritage and home. 

“We exist here. We don't have the same tangible relationship with the motherland, so to speak, as our forefathers. So what does it mean once you’ve landed here in the new country?” she asks.

McKercher found inspiration in second-generation stories outside the Asian diaspora, like The Sopranos and The Meyerowitz Stories. “I just felt like I had something new to offer to this slice of cinema,” she says. “I loved (these stories) and thought, ‘Okay, I can bring something unique to the Asian American or Asian Canadian experience.’”

Ultimately, Lucky Star can be summed up with one quote from McKercher herself.

“How do you break the cycle of your habits, whatever those are? (Whether it’s) asking your daughter for help or going to play poker or enabling your husband, how do you break it?” she asks.

Lucky Star premiered at the 2024 Calgary International Film Festival and received the Audience Choice Award for Alberta Feature. It went on to premiere internationally at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival earlier this year. The film will be available in North America on video on demand starting May 13 and will also screen in theaters throughout Canada in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, and Saskatoon on select dates throughout May.