A Holy Family

World premiere: Visions du Réel 2022 / International Feature Film Competition

After 20 years of absence, director A-Liang Elvis Lu returns home to his family in a rural area of southwestern Taiwan. His elder brother is a psychic that communicates Taoist deities’ career advice to villagers but repeatedly fails in his own entrepreneurial ventures in agriculture. Their father, a gambler of underground lottery, reads everything as a sign of lucky numbers. What holds the indebted family together is the mother, who, embittered in mind and increasingly enfeebled, finds her only consolation in their Taoist altar at home and a continuous stream of religious rituals performed there.

The previously estranged family, where love and grudges always intertwine and interchangeably surface, slowly comes closer together through A-Liang’s lens. It is an intimate journey of home-coming, a portrait of rekindled family bonding despite differences in religious beliefs, and an unflinching tale of self-discovery through filmmaking.

Taiwan / France, 2022, 90'