NYFF: A Family Tour

Murtada Elfadl reporting on the New York Film Festival

Early on in A Family Tour a reporter asks the lead character, a Chinese film director exiled in Hong Kong, why she makes political films. She answers that everything she makes is personal. Over the next two hours the film shows us exactly how the political is never separate from the personal.

The film is autobiographical, the director Ying Liang having lived in exile in Hong Kong since making When Night Falls (2012), a sharply critical look at the biased judicial system in China. He has switched the protagonist’s gender so we are following a female director (Gong Zhe) as she travels to a film festival in Taiwan with her husband and small child...

Discreetly the director is also following her mother (Nai An) who is in Taiwan separately with a tour group. The mother lives in mainland China, to which the daughter can not return. The mother has already suffered many visits and interrogations from the authorities in the years that her daughter has lived in exile. Trying to avoid attention, the family meets at sightseeing stops and meal times. The mother tries unsuccessfully to get her grandchild to stay still for a few seconds to snap a picture of him with her, while the daughter struggles with finding words to apologize for what she has put her mother through. “You are in Taiwan now, you can say anything you want,” her husband tells her. Yet the words are hard to come by.

The script is razor sharp and cuts to the bone of what it means to live in exile. No matter how safe our protagonist feels away from the oppression at home, she still doesn’t belong. It shows you how governments can stifle personal lives for years on end. The screenplay is empathetic and attune to the many small details that living in that situation puts you in. As someone who’s lived for years with an “undesirable” passport, when every airport entry is full of foreboding and dread, I felt this film in my guts.

Liang and his actors give us an affecting but no frills understated portrait of these characters in turmoil. They are not allowed to show emotion, lest they reveal their secret to the prying eyes around them. Like that tour guide who has to be constantly placated with gifts - a running gag that provides levity.

Our protagonists rarely find the right words to speak to each other yet they manage, finally, to communicate in a poignant scene of surprising intimacy and horror. An and Zhe negotiate this relationship  with clear eyed matter-of-fact yet touching work. They are in exile, always looking over their shoulders, never relaxed to express joy.

A Family Tour plays at the New York Film Festival on October 2nd and 3rd.