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Nai An (left) and Gong Zhe in a still from A Family Tour, a film by Ying Liang about a filmmaker from China living in Hong Kong and unable to return home to visit her mother because of a film she made. They arrange a reunion in Taiwan instead.
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Review | A Family Tour movie review: Chinese exile filmmaker’s semi-autobiographical drama about separation

  • Movie tells poignant story of a dissident Chinese filmmaker wanted by police over a film she made, who lives in exile in Hong Kong but aches to see her mother
  • Based on the experiences of its director Ying Liang, the film presages the fear of legal uncertainty the national security law introduced for some Hongkongers
Asian cinema: Hong Kong film
Edmund Lee
Edmund Lee
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4/5 stars

Paranoia pervades scene after scene in A Family Tour, a realistic look at the absurd dilemma facing a Chinese dissident in exile. Without resorting to dramatic scenes of confrontation, this heartbreaking drama quietly conveys the helplessness of individuals caught on the wrong side of China’s political ideal.

Yang Shu (Gong Zhe) is working as a teacher in Hong Kong when the state police arrive at her mother’s (Nai An) home in Sichuan province, southwest China, to find her. The Chinese independent filmmaker fell foul of the authorities after she made a feature about the mother of a convicted police murderer, and was branded “anti-society” and “anti-government”. By showing her subject’s plight in the film, Yang is alleged to have subverted state power.

Yang’s mother secretly records the conversation as a cautionary reminder to her daughter. Yang has not returned to China since that day five years earlier, is now married to a Hong Kong resident, Ka-ming (Pete Tao), and has a three-year-old son.

She keeps in contact with her mother online, but is desperate to see her before she has an operation. They make meticulous plans for a brief reunion in the Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung – the mother travelling there on a group sightseeing tour, and Yang as part of her itinerary while attending a film festival. Their meeting is so secretive, the family must pretend to be strangers in public.

Directed and co-scripted by Hong Kong-based China exile Ying Liang, who made a trip similar to that of his protagonist in 2014, A Family Tour contemplates the essence of family love under a regime where legal consequences in political cases often extend to the family of the accused. More than once, Yang’s mother describes the severing of ties with her daughter as their only way out.
Shot three years before the national security law became a reality in Hong Kong, Ying’s film, which premiered in 2018, presages the fear of legal uncertainty that many Hongkongers feel today – in one scene Yang learns of the mysterious disappearance of two producers of her next film project, to be set during 2014’s “umbrella movement”. protests in Hong Kong, when supporters of democracy occupied major roads for 79 days.
A still from A Family Tour.

Peppered with astute observations about the contrasting views of people in Hong Kong and China about the state’s control over their lives, A Family Tour is at its most powerful when it explores the family separation, enforced by state censure, at its core.

A Family Tour is streaming on Mubi.

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This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: heartbreaking tale of a Chinese dissident in exile
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