📽 Family on Film
A collection of brilliant depictions of the familiarity that family offers in (East) Asian films
This is Of Common Clay, a love-letter-like documentation in pursuit of grounding myself to the common clay we walk on and are made of.
I was cleaning out my drawers when I came across a series of badly cut posters of Asian films I’d printed out last summer but never around got to stick on the wall. A mile a minute, I opened my Letterboxd account to compile a collection of striking, eye-opening films that have widened my horizons. In an industry growing in Asian representation but nonethless still dominated by the visions of directors and casts of Western descent, I could rarely identify with the intermittent accuracy of familial traditions represented on camera. Sometimes injected with white saviourism, sensationalised tragedy, and jaundiced perspectives on our lived experiences, it is Asian (diaspora and non-diaspora alike) production that digs its nails with intentionality into the nuances of our people.
Asian film offers something that Western film sometimes fails to achieve—delivering potent messages that rely on the immersive power of atmosphere-driven subtlety. Free of slam-bang action, raucous conversation, or seismic resolution, these stories carry their own silent significance. They offer a conciliatory glance into the lives of common Asian households and breathe empathy into their stories. In simplicity, they often poke at social structure and foreground strong performances worn by strife. However, at its core, it is family and food that take central roles in connection to home, emotion, reconciliation, and status.
Movies are ranked in chronological order based on personal opinion.
#1 Minari (2020)
Penniless pockets in a beat-up trailer with one silver lining in mind: the immigrant’s dream. Lee Isaac Chung’s Oscar nominee Minari is successful in creating a name for itself despite running along the well-worn groove of retelling the plight of foreign settlers. He does it in a way so subtle, it multiplies a visceral impact thousandfold. The family does not move within a story; the family moves the story and creates its depth. Its simultaneously gentle yet impassioned characterisation of love and compromise prove to be a vibrant protest against their struggles. Jacob and Monica do not see eye to eye in balancing the need to fulfil their children’s immediate needs like a home close to schools, hospitals and a kind of safety that modern housing ensures, all while enduring initial cracks in the asphalt that drive Jacob closer to his dream of becoming the farmer and businessman he could boast to his kids. Their joint stubbornness becomes a conduit to their self-sabotage, and it ultimately forces them to make a choice. Nevertheless, if there is any takeaway from the film, it is that love, whether that be romantic or familial, tranquilises affliction but does not serve as an end-all solution to it.
#2 Us and Them (2018)
Us and Them is artless intimacy at its finest. Rene Liu deftly takes on the merging of romantic and familial love. Two people leave family behind to begin their careers; they strive to stay afloat amidst the uncertainties of moving to Beijing. It is an unforgiving depiction of the shame associated with coming home and sitting across friends and family without stature nor achievement, financial strife that tears apart relationships, and solitary woes in a big city that force them back together. Geometric yet gritty composition matches the half-calculated sacrifices Jianxing and Xioxiao make in order to sustain themselves in reality-worn circumstances. Through clever execution of greyscale and colour split into past and present, the movie realises an honest infungibility to people in a world marked by fleeting material possessions and swiftly moving careers.
#3 Shoplifters (2018)
An Academy Award nominee and Palme d’Or winner in 2018, Shoplifters features a makeshift family that takes in a young girl on the streets in the outskirts of Tokyo. Masterfully directed by prominent Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, their bond is woven taut by a life of poverty and petty crime. Kore-eda fosters sincere sympathy that humanises decisions enabled by desperation. The juxtaposition between slow stares in the mirror before nimble, practiced hand coordinations in pulling off convenience store robberies spotlight the self-criticism and guilt that accompany a life of crime. However, between shared bowls of rice, laughter, and understated declarations of care lies an uncorrupted kind of affection. Shoplifters fundamentally serves as a modest portrayal of the continuum of love that exists within stigmatised sectors of society.
#4 Moonlit Winter (2019)
An ode to suppressed vulnerability and unlearning internalised shame, Moonlit Winter is a quiet contrast to the dramatisation and hypersexualisation of queer couples in Western cinema. Lim Dae-hyung depicts loss through unmatched timing and unrecoverable memories. In the film, relentless snowfall that piles across the streets and covers any trace of footsteps becomes a clever allegory to layers of loss—communication erased by unread letters and one-sided conversations with the air, love diluted by societal pressures, and history corrupted by the natural process of growing up. This is met with the warm innocence of a daughter’s teenage romance which reopens Yoonhee and Saebom’s own and presents them with an opportunity to find closure. Here, ice thaws and leaves in its place candid and unadorned tenderness.
#5 Nobody Knows (2004)
Nobody Knows is a poignant, fictionalised retelling of the 1988 Sugamo abandonment, a case of a mother abandoning her four children who are left to fend for themselves. The scenes never demand pity from its audience nor build up to a culminating display of agony and violence. Once again, Kore-eda never strives to steer them in the direction of a contrived destination that pulls them out of their destitution nor does he seek to deliver apostolic commentary. Instead, the sequences carve out eldest brother Akira’s (played by Cannes Film Festival Best Actor Yuya Yagira) coming of age slowly tainted by cynicism and forced responsibility, from planting flowers in styrofoam cups to attempts at playing with kids who can afford schooling unlike him. As we, the audience, settle into their lives, contrasting sound design and cinematography further their exile into the margins of civilisation. The townspeople know of their situation, but nobody ever extends beyond their hollow curiosity.
I’ve only really scratched the surface of a vast subcategory that persists in Asian film. While I acknowledge the limitations of my recommendations with regard to exploring beyond East Asian cinema, there’ll definitely be more to come in future works!
Spreading the Minari agenda one day at a time,
Kristen <3