Tigertail

Pin-Jui works in a factory in Taiwan. He grew up poor, lives with his mother and loves a girl named Yuan. A chance to go to America appears, on one condition: he must marry his boss's daughter. He accepts. He goes to New York. His marriage to Zhenzhen is silent from the start; neither chose the other. Years pass, their daughter Angela grows up and cannot talk to her father. Now Pin-Jui is an old man and the distance between them does not close. The narrative moves between his youth in Taiwan and his present in America. Alan Yang writes and directs. Tzi Ma plays Pin-Jui, Lee Hong-Chi his younger self and Christine Ko his daughter. It was released on Netflix. The narrative starts from the director's own family; Yang said it was drawn from his father's story. The language is layered: Taiwanese, Mandarin and English are used together and the difference carries the distance between the generations. The Taiwan sections were shot to look like a different film stock and the past is separated visually. The matter it works at is the emotional silence of the immigrant generation; the film does not explain it, it shows it. Its limit is scale; the narrative is short and some strands are not opened enough. Yang had written comedy for television before and this is his first feature. Who it is for: viewers who like narratives of migration and generations. Who it is not for: the pace is slow, little happens, and the narrative deliberately suppresses feeling.