More than twenty years after leaving his household residence in rural Taiwan, documentary film-maker Elvis A-Liang Lu returns, this time with a digicam. One can sense the rationale why he left within the first place. Although modest in stature, the home shared by Lu’s older brother and his mother and father boasts an imposing shrine devoted to Taoist gods: his ageing mom climbs the steps daily to hope to the deities, and his psychic brother receives guests who search steering from above. Equally preoccupied by superstitions is his father, a playing addict who has squandered the household’s financial savings on the lottery.
What begins as a thorny portrait of intergenerational grievances step by step arrives at a profoundly shifting be aware of reconciliation, the digicam concurrently functioning because the agitator and the mediator. Lu often poses startlingly frank inquiries to his household, asking his mom, for instance, why she has by no means visited him in Taipei. Such bluntness is probably solely made attainable by the act of filming, which teases out sentiments which can be usually left unsaid. Over the course of the documentary, Lu’s lack of sympathy for his household’s beliefs softens right into a compassionate acceptance of his mother and father’ flaws. Filial love, like every other relationship, is all about compromises.
Intimate and private, A Holy Household additionally touches on the hardships of farm life. Despite his brother’s communion with the gods, his tomato crops had been worn out by a disastrous flood. Above all, this bittersweet movie astutely evokes the guilt of those who depart, alongside the quietly devastating realisation that the time we’ve got with our mother and father is rarely so long as we would assume.
