Sfiff Reviews By Travis Kirby

[Travis Kirby]

YING LIANG: TAKING FATHER HOME (2005)



REVIEW BY TRAVIS KIRBY

Taking Father Home is the story of Xu Yun, a poor country boy whose father left six years ago for a job in the city. Now Xu Yun is sick of not having his father around and he decides to go to the city and find his father and bring him back home. When he gets to the city it seems incredibly massive and Xu Yun asks a man known as “Scar” for help. This starts a long chain of coincidences that lead Xu Yun to his father, and he finds something other than what he expected.

Taking Father Home is a rough-edged, low budget film. When I say low budget I mean that the film was made using one borrowed Mini-DV camera and nearly the entire cast and crew were composed of volunteers or family members. The film had a total cost of approximately $3,000. And it shows.

The film has the same picture quality anybody could achieve by turning on their at home video-camera and saying to their best friend, “Hey, let’s make a movie!” The quality becomes distracting and you cannot ignore the fact that none of the actors have experience acting. The performances are incredibly stunted and it is almost painful to watch any of the conversations in the film. Almost all of the attempts at comedy are not in the least bit funny, and maybe some are lost in translation, or perhaps in the absolutely horrible subtitles, but I didn’t laugh once.

We have to give Ying Liang, the director of the film, credit for trying. He used what little money he could to make a film in a communist country that is in a calamity of poverty. Now he is traveling around the world to showcase his film, no matter how mediocre, to audiences of reasonable sizes.