Brief History of a Family

Watched this at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

Filmmaker Jianjie Lin creates a strong debut story with amazing camerawork, interesting writing and characters, and good ambitious approaches to the themes and setting. Lin does a good job on approaching the themes of the one-child policy effect, the character's personalities and ambitious, and the settings the narrative is exploring with. China's one-child policy is an interesting and difficult topic to explore and the movie does a good job on handling it's themes and style with the writing that feels interesting and engaging.

The camerawork, production, and the sound designs are really good and there were certain colorful choices that reminded me a lot of Wong Kar-wai in a good way. Many of the performances are pretty good as there are good family dynamics explored within one another.

The soundtrack and sound designs are good, the dialogue, while at times feel a little clunky, the visual presentations, and the camerawork is simply gorgeous to look at. There were a few certain aspects on the narrative that were a little strange but overall, I really liked it.

Art-house Chinese movies from Mainland China are not often discussed and I love to see more Chinese filmmakers branching out into the art-house world.