Bringemovies
← Browse Movies
Seventeen Years to Earth
TITLE DETAILS

Seventeen Years to Earth

1998-10-02 · 23 min · ★ 8.0

Romance · Drama

For 17 years, from the age of about six or seven, Kathy Chu keeps a diary. It's a complete fiction, denying disappointments (when her older sister doesn't want to spend time with her, Kathy invents and records a happy encounter) and rejections (she's teased for being Asian, but she writes about what fun she had with friends). Her hopes to be a writer compound the irony of her journal's disconnection. In college and after graduation, one of her closest friends is Kirby, who is also Asian. She denies any romantic attraction, and when they do become lovers, it's her diary that brings a crisis to their relationship and to her identify. Kathy falls back to earth.

Open detail page

Trailers are previews, not full movies.

No authorized playback source configured. Use the legal watch options below.

Production details

Directors
Perry Lin
Production companies
Unavailable
Countries
United States of America
Status
Released

Top Cast

Gina ChaiKathy Chu
Stella MaYoung Kathy
Jim ChuKirby Wang
Jo ShuiNarrator

Title information and images are supplied by TMDb. Explore our discovery guide for advice on comparing metadata and legal viewing options.

Where to watch

Availability provided by JustWatch via TMDb. Offers can change. Provider links are listed on TMDb; full playback requires a separately authorized source.

Availability not listed for this country.

Recommendations

All of You
★ 6.3
All of You2025Romance · Drama

Laura and Simon have been best friends since college. Over the years, they've realized their bond is more than platonic. Can they—and should they—risk everything to explore a love that has existed all along?

Moonlight Mile
★ 6.3
Moonlight Mile2002Romance · Drama

As he copes with the death of his fiancee along with her parents, a young man must figure out what he wants out of life.

Winter Spring Summer or Fall
★ 7.3
Winter Spring Summer or Fall2024Romance · Drama

Remi and Barnes, two very different teenagers, meet by chance in the winter of their senior year, then spend four days together over the course of a year that will change their lives forever.

Past Lives
★ 7.7
Past Lives2023Romance · Drama

After decades apart, childhood friends Nora and Hae Sung are reunited in New York for one fateful weekend as they confront notions of destiny, love, and the choices that make a life.

Time Is Up
★ 6.5
Time Is Up2021Romance · Drama

Vivien, an accomplished student with a passion for physics, and Roy, a troubled young man, are involved in an accident that forces them to reclaim their lives one minute at the time.

Mo' Better Blues
★ 6.5
Mo' Better Blues1990Drama

Talented but self-centered trumpeter Bleek Gilliam is obsessed with his music and indecisiveness about his girlfriends Indigo and Clarke. But when he is forced to come to the aid of his manager and childhood friend, Bleek finds his world more fragile than he ever imagined.

Death of a Superhero
★ 6.9
Death of a Superhero2011Drama

A dying 15-year-old boy draws stories of an invincible superhero as he struggles with his mortality.

Purple Hearts
★ 8.0
Purple Hearts2022Romance · Drama

An aspiring musician agrees to a marriage of convenience with a soon-to-deploy Marine, but a tragedy soon turns their fake relationship all too real.

Love Me Love Me
★ 6.1
Love Me Love Me2026Romance · Drama

After her brother's death, June moves to Milan for a fresh start, finding comfort in Will, the perfect honor student at her new international school. But when his troubled best friend James—hiding a dangerous life in clandestine MMA fights—sparks a rivalry that quickly turns into irresistible attraction, June must choose between safety and a love that upends everything she thought she wanted.

Love Everlasting
★ 7.4
Love Everlasting2016Romance · Drama

Bridger is a young outsider who's always wanted more. He and his mother flee an abusive home, eventually finding a small town in the middle of nowhere. Once there, Bridger finds true acceptance with another misfit.

Girls Like Girls
★ 7.5
Girls Like Girls2026Romance · Drama

After her mother's passing, 17-year-old Coley navigates new feelings of intimacy with Sonya in rural Oregon, where both girls must overcome their mutual uncertainties and self-doubt to embrace their connection.

Sylvie's Love
★ 6.2
Sylvie's Love2020Romance · Drama

When a young woman meets an aspiring saxophonist in her father’s record shop in 1950s Harlem, their love ignites a sweeping romance that transcends changing times, geography, and professional success.

Newness
★ 6.1
Newness2017Romance · Drama

In contemporary Los Angeles, two millennials navigating a social media–driven hookup culture begin a relationship that pushes both emotional and physical boundaries.

Wander Darkly
★ 6.0
Wander Darkly2020Romance · Drama

New parents Adrienne and Matteo are forced to reckon with trauma amidst their troubled relationship. They must revisit the memories of their past and unravel haunting truths in order to face their uncertain future.

Goodbye June
★ 6.5
Goodbye June2025Drama

Four siblings' lives change drastically when their ailing mother takes a turn for the worse over the holiday season.

The Lost Husband
★ 6.6
The Lost Husband2020Romance · Drama

Trying to put her life back together after the death of her husband, Libby and her children move to her estranged Aunt's goat farm in central Texas.

The Way We Were
★ 7.0
The Way We Were1973Romance · Drama

Opposites attract when, during their college days, Katie Morosky, a politically active Jew, meets Hubbell Gardiner, a feckless WASP. Years later, in the wake of World War II, they meet once again and, despite their obvious differences, attempt to make their love for each other work.

Fire with Fire
★ 6.2
Fire with Fire1986Romance · Drama

A tough, street-smart kid serving a sentence in a state youth reformatory meets a beautiful, innocent girl studying at a nearby convent. When forbidden love blossoms between them, they must fight the prison authorities, their parents and the law.

Chemical Hearts
★ 7.3
Chemical Hearts2020Romance · Drama

When a hopelessly romantic high school senior falls for a mysterious new classmate, it sets them both on an unexpected journey that teaches them about love, loss, and most importantly themselves.

The Sun Is Also a Star
★ 6.9
The Sun Is Also a Star2019Romance · Drama

Two young New Yorkers begin to fall in love over the course of a single day, as a series of potentially life-altering meetings loom over their heads - hers concerning her family’s deportation to Jamaica, and his concerning an education at Dartmouth.

Similar titles

You, Fireworks, and Our Promise
Not rated
You, Fireworks, and Our Promise2026Romance · Drama

The coming-of-age romance is set during the Nagaoka Festival Grand Fireworks Show, one of Japan's three major fireworks shows that draws several hundred thousand visitors to Niigata Prefecture every year. What connects Makoto (a Tokyo high school boy without social skills or self-confidence) and Aki (a popular high school girl and class president with beauty and talent) is a drawing of a fireworks display. At the mercy of the drawing's mystery and fate itself, the two have to make a choice in a limited amount of time.

Bambi
★ 7.0
Bambi1942Drama

Bambi's tale unfolds from season to season as the young prince of the forest learns about life, love, and friends.

Off the Road
★ 7.0
Off the Road2013Drama

Paul, fourteen, neglects his studies to spend all his time on his moped, to the consternation of his parents.

The Holdovers
★ 7.6
The Holdovers2023Drama

A curmudgeonly instructor at a New England prep school is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually, he forms an unlikely bond with one of them — a damaged, brainy troublemaker — and with the school’s head cook, who has just lost a son in Vietnam.

Girl, Interrupted
★ 7.6
Girl, Interrupted1999Drama

Set in the changing world of the late 1960s, Susanna Kaysen's prescribed "short rest" from a psychiatrist she had met only once becomes a strange, unknown journey into Alice's Wonderland, where she struggles with the thin line between normal and crazy. Susanna soon realizes how hard it is to get out once she has been committed, and she ultimately has to choose between the world of people who belong inside or the difficult world of reality outside.

DRAWN OUT
Not rated
DRAWN OUT2025Drama

On the eve of leaving for college, Randy discovers that the childhood drawings she's long forgotten are not quite ready to let her go. When her imaginary friends come to life, they pull her into a surreal final adventure through her own home, one that forces her to confront buried memories, unresolved guilt, and the fear she's been avoiding. As fantasy and reality collide, Randy must decide whether to run from her past or face it head-on, learning that growing up doesn't mean leaving every part of yourself behind.

My Girl
★ 7.4
My Girl1991Drama

Vada Sultenfuss is obsessed with death. Her mother is dead, and her father runs a funeral parlor. She is also in love with her English teacher, and joins a poetry class over the summer just to impress him. Thomas J., her best friend, is "allergic to everything", and sticks with Vada despite her hangups. When Vada's father hires Shelly, and begins to fall for her, things take a turn to the worse...

Poster unavailable
Not rated
CrescendoDrama

As the end-of-year concert approaches, Théa, a young student pianist at a conservatory, finds herself losing all her nerve due to her fascination with one of her elders, Cécile.

Homebreaker
★ 4.0
Homebreaker2015Drama

Eelis is skipping classes, mom and dad are on the verge of divorce, sister has yet another boyfriend. The life of a little boy is in its turning point.

A Green Lighter
Not rated
A Green LighterRomance · Drama

After a brief but intense relationship with a rootless young man, a quiet woman must confront the unsettling realization that she has lost her sense of self.

Dense on the Sea
★ 4.7
Dense on the Sea2000Drama

Constant Wegman (Benja Bruijning), a 14 year old boy, raised by his grandmother (Carry Tefsen) in Zeedijk, Amsterdam. She is the owner of a cafe-hotel “De Rode Laars” (“The Red Boots”). The dreaming Constant runs away from this world of drunkards, gamblers, fighters by writing poems. His grandmother wants him to take control of the cafe. Then Constant secretly subscribes to a national poem writing competition: a new Vondel is born!

Mildred Pierce
★ 7.6
Mildred Pierce1945Drama

A hard-working mother inches towards disaster as she divorces her husband and starts a successful restaurant business to support her spoiled daughter.

One Summer
Not rated
One Summer2025Drama

„Ein Sommer“ tells the story of a young girl who is afraid to live the life she wishes for. As she gets to know the new girl in town, she reflects on all the things she would have loved to have done and is forced to face her fears.

Skyvory
Not rated
SkyvoryDrama

Empire of the Sun
★ 7.5
Empire of the Sun1987Drama

Jamie Graham, a privileged English boy, is living in Shanghai when the Japanese invade and force all foreigners into prison camps. Jamie is captured with an American sailor, who looks out for him while they are in the camp together. Even though he is separated from his parents and in a hostile environment, Jamie maintains his dignity and youthful spirit, providing a beacon of hope for the others held captive with him.

Sisterhood
★ 5.8
Sisterhood2022Drama

The friendship of two adolescent girls is threatened the moment they have to face the dire repercussions of their manipulative behaviour.

Breaking Pencils
Not rated
Breaking Pencils2021Drama

Sep learns how to navigate high-school life.

One Summer Night
★ 3.8
One Summer Night2020Romance · Drama

Before heading off to college, an overthinking teenager asks out a former girlfriend in an effort to reconnect and hold on to his past.

Matèl
Not rated
Matèl2025Drama

A young man living a monotonous life finds his boredom interrupted when he encounters a group of boys while working at a pedalo rental place.

New
Not rated
New2026Romance · Drama

The beginning of the end and the end of the beginning

Your favorites

Recently viewed

Watch

Choose an authorized server.

Full video from an operator-configured authorized source. Official trailers use a separate player. If a server fails, retry or select another authorized server.

Legal watch options

Official trailer

Trailer preview only. Press Play to start.

Privacy choices

Favorites stay in your browser. Movie images load from TMDb. YouTube trailers contact YouTube only after you allow external media and choose a trailer. Advertising consent, if ads are enabled, is managed separately by the operator’s certified CMP.

Privacy policy

After allowing external media, choose the trailer button to load its player.