Reflecting for 17 years on his family's immigration legacy, the filmmaker confronts the delicate images of a once intact family.
Between faded family photographs, old video footage, and interviews collected through the years, Alvin Tsang's REUNIFICATION bears the look and feel of a documentary that's taken decades to produce. Perhaps it required all that time for Tsang to fully process his family's history and confront his own emotionally turbulent upbringing. For the audience though, that passing of time is key to the film's powerful portrayal of tireless emotional reconciliation. When his mother and two siblings first immigrated from Hong Kong to Los Angeles in the early 1980s, six-year-old Alvin was forced to stay behind with his working, and consequently absent, father. Spending the following three years often alone in an empty apartment, he longed for his family's reunification. However, upon Alvin and his father's arrival to America, that dream was utterly and permanently shattered under circumstances the filmmaker has yet to fully comprehend to this day. REUNIFICATION is Tsang's self-reflexive exploration of many unresolved years - poetic in its wonderfully-articulated narration and in its restraint as he grasps for any semblance of explanation. Backed by an achingly beautiful score, the film moves moodily across different channels and modes, bending into labor histories and Hong Kong's colonial trajectories, wading in the mire of nostalgia, grief, and confusion that is his past. And in his search for answers, Tsang turns the camera on his own family, cautiously prodding for answers, but fully acknowledging that the only closure he can get will be from deciding for himself how to move on.—Brandon Yu
In this personal documentary that gives an inside view of the contemporary immigrant experience that only a first-generation immigrant can portray, New York-based filmmaker ALVIN TSANG digs through a box of old videotapes and his family photo album, and recounts his life. He chooses to start his story in 2000 when, as a young adult, Alvin moves into a tiny Los Angeles apartment with his FATHER. Alvin struggles to understand and rebuild his relationship with both of his parents whose divorce is fraught with the emotional trauma, blame, and hardships surrounding his familys immigration to the U.S. from Hong Kong some fifteen years ago.
When he was six-years old, the filmmakers MOTHER and two SIBLINGS went ahead and settled in Los Angeles leaving the filmmaker and his father in Hong Kong for three years. Alvins father worked long hours and neglected parenting his young son in order to make enough money to join his wife and family in the United States. Meanwhile, young Alvin yearned for a happy reunion that never happened. His mother had secretly fallen in love with a fellow immigrant in the U.S. and abandoned her husband and young son.
Later as an adult filmmaker, Alvin grapples with immigration memories (arriving in L.A. and discovering his parents divorce, becoming a child laborer while growing up, leaving home to attend college, etc.) and tries to mend his family and understand what broke them apart in the first place. Alvin travels back to Hong Kong with his family, accepting the fragmented configurations, and reflects on his reconnection to extended family, the sense of belonging and nostalgia, and the changes in his native country.
By combining childhood photos and cinema-verité and interview footage of Alvins family, archival news footage of the 1997 Hong Kong Handover, photos of early 1900s U.S. child labor reform movement, and stream of consciousness narrative, REUNIFICATION explores the process of self-preservation and acceptance, while providing a uniquely intimate insight on the immigrant experience and family.
