The closing film for the 21st Taipei Film Festival will be So Long, My Son by Wang Xiaoshuai. The festival will run from June 27th until July 13th, in Taipei, Taiwan.

So Long, My Son by Wang Xiaoshuai – China | 2019 – 185 minutes

Introduction：“We’re waiting to grow old.” This sentence briefly sums up Yaoyun and his wife Liyun’s bitter realisation about their lives. They were once a happy family – until their son drowned playing by a reservoir. And so Yaojun and Liyun leave their home and plunge into the big city, although nobody knows them there and they cannot even understand the local dialect. Their adopted son Liu Xing does not offer them the comfort they had hoped for either. Defiantly rejecting his ‘foreign’ parents, he one day disappears altogether. The married couple are repeatedly enmeshed in their memories. Finally, they decide to return to the site of their lost hopes. Part melodrama, part critique of the times, this film takes us from the country’s upheaval in the 1980s following the Cultural Revolution to the prospering turbo-capitalism of the present day. (Taipei Film Festival Catalogue 2019)

Schedule:
July 9th | Tuesday | Taipei Zhongshan Hall | 18:20 pm

Trailer:

About the Director: Wang Xiaoshuai graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1989. A pioneering director of 1990s independent Chinese cinema, he is one of the few filmmakers who remain true to his art in spite of the rampant commercialism of China’s film market.