Seated for a recent Zoom call, Sebiye Behtiyar rocks forward and back, her face lit with the same quiet intensity that fuels her breakout performance in "Preparation for the Next Life".
She is speaking about Aishe, the young Uyghur heroine she plays in Bing Liu’s film. Aishe is a woman both bruised and defiant, who carries loneliness like a second skin but refuses to be swallowed by it.
“There is some similarity with me and my character,” Behtiyar says. This is her first-ever press day. Her voice soft yet clear and determined. “I can resonate with her as a person who is also very far away from my own hometown, and I know that kind of loneliness. But I truly think she is much, much stronger than me, because she has to face all those difficulties and injustice in her life, in her reality, all the time.”
It’s hard to imagine Behtiyar as anything but strong. This is, after all, her very first film role. It’s a debut most actors only dream of, yet she carries the movie with an ease that feels instinctual. Handpicked by Oscar-nominated director Bing Liu after casting director Jennifer Venditti saw her on a Facebook post, Behtiyar was still a student when she found herself embodying a woman whose resilience has nothing to do with Hollywood archetypes.
If Aishe is the film’s heart, Fred Hechinger’s character, Skinner, is its haunted shadow. An American soldier stripped of glory, wounded into invisibility, Skinner embodies the uneasy truth of veterans who are celebrated until their brokenness becomes inconvenient.
“This experience was really sacred, truly,” Hechinger reflects, his words tumbling out with reverence. “Sebiye is just a genius actress. And Bing Liu — his first film, Minding the Gap, is one of my favorites — he brought the same depth and care here. We got to be on the actual streets where this story took place, experiencing it with all of these beautiful artists and collaborators.”
But Hechinger admits that showing vulnerability on-screen did not come easily. “It’s hard to trust anybody right now. We need each other, we need safe communities, but it’s so hard to trust people. And I felt like we had this very powerful ring of trust around us. It pushed me to want to always go further and further. I didn’t just want to be vulnerable, I wanted to find things I didn’t even think I could find.”
The film, then, is not about conquest or triumph. It’s about two castoffs, an immigrant and a wounded soldier, grappling with intimacy when the world has already discarded them.
Bing Liu’s Unsentimental Lens
For director Bing Liu, who stunned critics with his documentary Minding the Gap, this film is both personal and political. It is not the kind of immigrant story that America likes to comfort itself with: the bootstrap parable of rags to riches. The screenplay is written by Martyna Majok and it is based on the novel of the same name, written by Atticus Lish.
“I think it’s a story that slowly subverts expectations,” Liu says. “It’s not so much about material gain. It’s about realizing at the end that actually having community really matters.”
That conviction is rooted in his own life. Liu’s immigrant mother was one of countless invisible laborers in America’s kitchens, working long hours in restaurants where survival left no room for dreams. One detail from his childhood became a seed for the film: a white American customer who once followed his mother home and asked her out. “People fall in love in the strangest, weirdest ways,” Liu shrugs. “And it doesn’t always look like what you’ve seen in movies.”
But Liu refuses to give in to fantasy. While many view romantic love as a salvation, in his film, it is a struggle, negotiation, and, sometimes, release. “Neither of these characters had any experience with a healthy relationship. They just kind of are left on their own to figure it out, and it gets messy. They really want to make it work. They just don’t know how. That’s the tragedy.”
Still, Liu insists on a flicker of grace. The film closes in on an image that can be an ending, or a beginning. He prefers the question to remain unanswered.
Behtiyar, who grew up speaking three languages like her character, threw herself into physical training and long conversations with women who shared Aishe’s precarious existence. “At first, I was so nervous, because that was my first major role, and I had a little bit of self-doubt,” she admits. “But working with Fred and Bing, they gave me unconditional support and confidence. That kind of strength encouraged me to bring Aishe’s life into reality.”
If her performance feels lived-in, it’s because it is. She knows what it is to be far from home, to carve out resilience in the spaces where community frays. “Like Fred said, ‘A good story always brings good people together,’” she says, smiling at the memory of set days that felt like family.
Love, But Not the Hollywood Kind
The love story at the center of Liu’s film is not tidy. It doesn’t reward patience with marriage or hardship with wealth. It acknowledges that immigrants are too often criminalized, that wounded soldiers are too often discarded, and that intimacy between such outsiders cannot heal systemic abandonment.
And yet, there is something quietly hopeful in Aishe’s arc and the way she finds belonging in a community.
“I really hope people consider the ways in which we need to learn how to connect with other people if we’re going to survive in a meaningful way,” Liu says.
Perhaps that’s the most radical thing this film does: it insists that survival is not enough, and that sometimes the most powerful love stories are the ones that end not with a kiss, but with the courage to walk away.
Preparation for the Next Life is executive-produced by Brad Pitt, Bing Liu, and Sophia Lin, and released through Amazon MGM Studios.
Here in Hollywood comes out every Friday. Have a question about Hollywood celebrities? Contact Yong on Instagram: @yongchavez