SYNOPSIS

Director｜Jay Chieh-Chun Lee

Screenwriter｜Jay Chieh-Chun Lee

Cast｜None

Producer｜None

Cinematographer｜Jay Chieh-Chun Lee

Genre｜Documentary

Length｜48min

Year｜2020

Dialogue｜Mandarin

Subtitles｜English

Region｜United States

Production Company｜None

Synopsis

My fear of my father from my childhood leads me to explore my father-son relationship, starting from the investigation of Grandfather’s life. I gradually discover that there is something intergenerationally connecting us all together. The more I understand, the more courage I have to unfold something I’ve never known.

Director Biography

Jay Chieh-Chun Lee is a film/video maker and urban planner from Taipei, Taiwan. After studying in non-fiction filmmaking in New York City for several years, he is now back to his homeland—Taipei to pursue his career. His approach to art starts from his personal experience and the stories that surround him, with an aim to arrive at a broader social context. He believes that by narrating his own experiences and thoughts and making films that tell stories of people, he can understand how we perceive the relationship between self and society and how we construct our point of view seeing this world.

Director’s Statement

I looked to filmmaking as a healing process to deal with the barrier caused by the fear I felt towards my father. The courage I gained in the process though did not help us fully identify with each other, still diminished my fear of my father.

I made this film not aiming for the audience but mainly for myself. The hardest topic I put in between the conversation with my father and me became a tool that helped myself breakthrough my comfort zone. The feelings for him were perplexing and nuanced. It was a mixture of love, fear, respect, impatience, empathy, and many other emotions. To me, it was not easy to articulate this feeling with words and I could only express it through other sensorial experience. So I filmed our everyday life scenes that include daily interactions to build up what our relationship looked like. I hope the audience can actively perceive what I was feeling by observing events without explanation.