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A HOLY FAMILY

神人之家

By Elvis A-Liang LU

Documentary - Completed 2022

After missing from home for more than 20 years, director Elvis A-Liang Lu travels back to his family in the deep Taiwanese countryside to untangle how gambling, faith and illness have deepened the gaps between him and his relatives and to come to terms with their untold stories.

Festivals
& Awards

Visions du Réel 2022

Compétition Internationale Longs Métrages

Taipei IFF 2022

Best Edit, Best Documentary, Audience Choice Award and the Grand Prize of the Festival

Fipadoc Biarritz 2023

Prix Ciné+

Budapest IDF 2023

Hong Kong IFF 2023

Astra Film Festival Sibiu 2023

- Year of production
- 2022
- Genres
- Documentary, Family, Second film
- Countries
- TAIWAN, FRANCE
- Languages
- TAIWANESE, MANDARIN
- Duration
- 88 mn
- Director(s)
- Elvis A-Liang LU
- Producer(s)
- Stefano CENTINI (VOLOS FILMS LTD.), Jean-Laurent CSINIDIS (FILMS DE FORCE MAJEURE)
- Synopsis
- After 24 years of absence, director Elvis A-Liang Lu returns to his family in a rural area of southwestern Taiwan.
  His elder brother, A-Zhi, has been recognized as a psychic in the village since the age of 12. Having set up a home altar with 12 Taoist deities since then, A-Zhi communicates deities’ advice to villagers on a donation basis; whereas A-Zhi helps believers make career decisions with his psychic readings, he repeatedly fails in his own entrepreneurial ventures in agriculture.
  
  The father of A-Liang and A-Zhi is a gambler who is addicted to an underground lottery and seeks celestial hints for good numbers even in the rising smoke of worshipping incense; he believes that the deities will one day show him lucky numbers to make him rich overnight. What holds the indebted family together is their mother. After 40-year marriage with her irresponsible husband, she is embittered in mind and increasingly enfeebled; the only consolation she finds is in their Taoist altar at home and a continuous stream of religious rituals performed there.
  
  A-Liang, urged by his mother to finance the family whenever a bill ends up unpaid, disagrees with his family’s religious practices, superstitions, and blind beliefs in supposedly life-changing miracles. When he comes back home from the capital with a camera more than two decades later, he is forced to face his own trauma and grudges and starts to observe the intertwined emotions in his family from the perspective of a filmmaker. 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.

A HOLY FAMILY

神人之家

Festivals& Awards

Festivals
& Awards