Reunification

Memories of Migration and a Once Intact Family

"In a style reminiscent of Chris Marker" (Facets) and praised for its "clear-eyed honesty" (Meredith Monk), this award-winning film gives an insider view on the contemporary Asian American immigrant experience, family psychology, and personal filmmaking. Director Alvin Tsang reflects for 17 years on his family's migration from Hong Kong to Los Angeles in the early 1980s - fraught with betrayal from his parents' divorce, economic strife and communication meltdown between parents and children.

This poetic exploration moves moodily across different channels and modes, bending into labor histories and Hong Kong's colonial trajectories. 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.

Winner of Special Jury Prize at the San Diego Asian Film Festival.

"A layered documentary that is as much an inquiry into the nature of time and memory as it is an individual's diary... REUNIFICATION explores the past with a Proustian sensitivity. Tsang retrieves an old childhood memory... and in it finds a lost world in which everyone was united and safe." - Peter Keough, The Boston Globe

"It's a documentary unlike any I've seen - a film very clearly put together to say things through the language of film that the filmmaker is uncomfortable saying any other way... REUNIFICATION is the film that's come closest to feeling like a truly distinct Asian-American [film] language." - Arthur Chu, Salon