Private Project

DOUBLE HAPPINESS

After the death of her husband of 50 years, a life-affirming Jewish widow and the tightly-wound Chinese-American restaurateur who serves her family every Christmas, find themselves drawn into an unexpected late-in-life romance.

  • Shari Albert
    Director
  • Shari Albert
    Writer
  • Laura LeeLun
    Writer
  • Shari Albert
    Producer
  • Laura LeeLun
    Producer
  • Rollin Studios
    Producer
  • Clem Cheung
    Key Cast
    "Richard Wang"
  • Kathryn Grody
    Key Cast
    "Lillian Zelman "
  • Beth Dover
    Key Cast
    "Julie Zelman "
  • Henry James Gross
    Key Cast
    "Isaac Zelman "
  • Teresa Hui
    Key Cast
    "Li Na"
  • Iris Feng
    Key Cast
    "Sam Chen "
  • Dave Shalansky
    Key Cast
    "Rabbi Ben "
  • Bonnie Rose
    Key Cast
    "Nancy Silverstein "
  • Max Wolkowitz
    Key Cast
    "Young Max Zelman "
  • Irina Kaplan
    Key Cast
    "Young Lillian Zelman "
  • Chhoyang Cheshatsang
    Key Cast
    "Young Richard Wang"
  • Katie Lee Hill
    Key Cast
    "Young Jeanie Wang "
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Genres:
    Rom-Com
  • Runtime:
    16 minutes 56 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    May 29, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    67,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Shooting Format:
    4K
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
  • Soho International Film Festival
    New York
    October 11, 2025
    NYC
    AUDIENCE AWARD WINNER
  • Newport Beach Film Festival
    Newport Beach, CA
    October 21, 2025
  • Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival
    Philadelphia, PA
    November 19, 2025
    AUDIENCE AWARD WINNER
  • Denver Jewish Film Festival
    Denver
    United States
    AUDIENCE AWARD
Director Biography - Shari Albert

Shari Albert is a New York–based writer, director, and actor who tells deeply human stories through a comedic lens. Her most recent short film, Double Happiness, which she directed and co-wrote, serves as a proof of concept for her feature of the same name. The film has been embraced on the festival circuit, winning the Audience Award at the Soho International Film Festival and Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival, as well as screening at festivals nationwide, including Lincoln Center's NYJFF, Newport Beach, The Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival, Denver Jewish Film Festival, Big Apple Film Festival, and many more to come...
Shari’s first short film, which she wrote and directed, Will You Take This Dog?, earned her the Best Female Content Creator Award at the Bowery Film Festival and screened at numerous festivals including San Francisco IndieFest, New Ohio Film Festival, and NYC Web Fest, among others.
As a writer, Shari was a 2022 cohort of The Writers Lab, supported by Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman, and her screenplays have placed in top competitions such as the Austin Film Festival, Big Apple Film Festival, and Final Draft’s Big Break Contest. Her work is also published in She Persisted, a collection of monologues by women playwrights from Applause Books.
With over thirty years of experience in front of the camera, Shari brings an actor’s intuition and a storyteller’s precision to her directing. She continues to build a body of work that blends heart, humor, and truth — finding the extraordinary in the everyday. She lives in New York City with her husband and their rescue dachshund, Dr. Watson.

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Director Statement

This short is a love letter to Jewish and Chinese American traditions, to the quietly radical act of late-in-life romance, and to the found families we create, especially over a good holiday meal. It’s also our proof of concept for the feature version, which began life as a tweet that has gone viral every Christmas since 2020 and brought me and co-writer/producer Laura LeeLun together.

Double Happiness is a romantic dramedy that begins where most love stories end—with a shiva. It’s about Lillian Zelman, a 75-year-old Jewish spitfire, and Richard Wang, a stoic Chinese-American restaurateur whose paths have crossed every Christmas for four decades (as it is written in the Talmud, of course). When they reconnect after the death of Lillian’s husband, what begins as comfort unexpectedly turns into... something more.