A Family Tour

First, I agree with the reviewer Shan Bhattacharya. What is the purpose of this film? For me it is to show the complex relationships between the state-level politics of countries and individuals who live in them and then the interrelations between the countries and individuals. Sounds dry? Well, this movie is anything but! The above thematic is shown through a very human drama. There is conflict, compelling characters, drama, good dialogue for the most part, and a sense of menace that hands over each scene (once we understand what is going on.) Also a lot of subtext.

I think a viewer will need to have at least some basic knowledge of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the history and relationships therein, recent events and also some understanding of "Asian family values" (yah I'll go as broad as that) and Chinese culture to really appreciate a complex, nuanced and essential film, which, by the way is far from perfect.

I was not always awed while I was watching this movie, though fascinated, but after it ended and I saw all the aspects/threads and mulled on them and the interconnections I could only say WOW!

I am an activist and rebel type of person, a woman, rooting for social justice and democracy, and I am is happy to have seen a film with a strong if flawed activist-filmmaker woman protagonist and a film that reflects my concerns in the world rather than a more "vapid" perfect film about/on topics that I don't give a damn about!

Even if an international audience is not aware enough about the history and the contemporary political details about the inter-relationship between mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, there is something universal about an artist's relationship with their country's laws of censorship. Having said that, audience from many perpetually liberal countries will have a difficult time appreciating a film like this - a film that has so many rough edges out of a humble production. If you have lived in a repressive state that treats its political dissenters with fierce spite, you can totally relate to the dilemma of a political artist - whether to conform and protect your family from state vendetta or to continue with your ideological battle even at the cost of putting your loved ones in trouble. The director of this film seems to tell their own deeply personal experiences, a rather absurd one at that, through a lens of fiction. Yet its connections to reality are deeply unnerving. There is little point in evaluating a film like this in terms of the quality of production, acting etc. Still the director has managed to unfold several subtle, poignant instances of human reaction. The characters appear all too real. Playing the protagonist must have been difficult for the actress - her character is an emotional mess, yet adopting a deadpan exterior to suppress all the anger inside. The occasionally brilliant screenplay doesn't say much, but suggests a lot- a trait I have often come to appreciate in cinema.

There is a certain sense of defeat in the protagonist (Yin Liang's alter ego), whose last movie she shot five years ago. A pessimistic vision of the power of cinema as a political denunciation. Almost with a Zen pace, the story finds in the family reunion the only glimmer of hope, but following a certain formality ("it's the Chinese way of loving"). Separation becomes defense of emotions against controlling politics. Hope is an illusion.

Yang Shu, a young dissident Chinese director and exile in Hong Kong (Gong Zhe) attends as a guest with her husband and young son to a film festival in a city in Taiwan, also joining a tour of that city that they arranged with her mother (still residing in China and which he could not visit), considering various possibilities from that reunion.

A Family Tour is a film by Liang Ying that paints with calm tension various edges of a problematic relationship between mother and daughter, marked by loss, exile and different views on politics and its effects.

To what extent do family histories mark political elections and artistic militancy? To what extent can artistic militancy determine behaviors at the family level to transform them into political and therefore public messages? How does politics get in the way of family ties? How do mother and daughter decode each other's decisions?

The film soberly (and with lines of poetry) poses this family reunion as a crossroads and at the same time a continuum of blurred boundaries between those private and public, personal and artistic dimensions.