New York Asian Film Festival 2019

[Chris Knipp]

KALBINUR AND ISA IN A FIRST FAREWELL

Wide US release of A FIRST FAREWELL 第一次的离别 (Wang Lina 2018 on June 25, 2021.

A few recent reviews find flaws not pointed out earlier.

Wang Lina's well-reviewed A First Farewell is releasing online June 25, 2021 on Amazon Prime Video, Hoopla, Vimeo on Demand, Cathay Play, Smart Cinema USA, Montage Play (more at AFirstFarewell.com).

A First Farewell received raves at its festival release from admiring reviewers, including myself. But some reviews appearing more recently have been more critical.

Among these is a Feb. 25, 2021 LA Times review by Michael Ordona that questions some of Wang Lina's methods and finds the film dangerously unclear about the current Uyghur situation. He feels Wang's "filmmaking techniques blurring documentary and narrative" and her dodging of censorship have led to problems. He notes the director admits deceiving the child actor to make her cry when chastised in school and never revealed the deception. Ordona points out the film never so much as mentions the humanitarian crisis the Uyghurs are in, a situation the US has officially designated as "genocide." The film's lack of direct criticism of Chinese policy toward the Uyghurs, he notes, must have been necessary to "get it past stringent censors in a country where" (quoting a New York Times article), "a vast system of surveillance, detention, cultural erasure and forced labor has devastated the Uyghur people in their homeland." All this, Ordona says, makes the film "murky" - morally and intellectually confused. Can the use of fictionalized documentary methods have brought about dangerous distortions in this case? Ordona certainly implies so.

A Letterboxd citizen reviewer with moniker "nathanrao" expresses similar views. The reviewer notes that though the film is "beautifully shot" and "moving" they "don't understand what wang was trying to say" and concluded that she was probably "hamstrung from a greater message due to politics." This about sums it up: A First Farewell is a striking debut, beautiful and touching and remarkable in its use of non-actors, even if that at some points may be questionable; but the film is vague about the larger issues of the Uyghur humanitarian crisis, a "murkiness" due to politics and censorship constraints. The focus on the children's point of view may be seen in this context as a strategy enabling the filmmaker to bypass those constraints and avoid confronting headlong larger issues the young protagonists might not yet be aware of.