Taking Father Home

Melancholy and ostensibly amateurish in some of its DV imagery – it was made on a shoe-string with much help from friends and family – this filial quest story still offers some pertinent insights into contemporary western Chinese life. Urbanisation is the subtext, as headstrong teenage villager Xu Yun strikes out for the big city to which his father absconded six years earlier, armed only with a dubious address on a scrap of paper and a basket of ducks. His progress is sometimes amusing if somewhat aimless, while the interpolation of news footage of a flood and Hu Jintao’s taking power with the melodramatic climax has more political resonance than narrative clout.