ACF
Asian Cinema Fund
Asian Network of Documentary(AND) Fund
2008 Asian Network of Documentary (AND) Fund
LIST Father & Son (aka. The Orchard Keeper)
| Category | Pusan Bank Fund |
|---|---|
| Project | Father & Son (aka. The Orchard Keeper) |
| Director | He YUAN |
| Country | China |
| Director's Profile | He YUAN was born in 1975 in Lijiang, Yunnan Province. He completed the Visual Anthropology course at Yunnan University, and he started to make documentaries and write essays on film. His works include [First Touch With Ing], and [Returning and The Son Is Not At Home]. His collaborative works include [Jade Green Station](2004) by Yu Jian and [Our Courtyard](2006) by Frode Storaas. He YUAN has been actively engaged in the promotion of documentary film production and exhibition since his days as a publisher of Film Notes magazine of the Kunming Film Study Group in Yunnan University. |
- Synopsis
- [Father & Son] (aka. The Orchard Keeper) is the story of a father and his adult son. At eighty-four years of age, Master Cai is the last great Naxi folk musician on the north shore of the Jinsha River. He depends on his fifty year old mentally-disabled son Da for a living. It is winter and Cai feels that his days are drawing to an end. His only worry is his son Da, who would not be able to take care of himself once his father passed away. Cai falls ill, and Da comes back from the orchard to care for his ailing father in his own special way. With little time left together, the father and son relationship grows tense.
- Director's Note
- With globalization, modern lifestyles and consumerism are infiltrating and altering Chinese people’s lives as well as those of inhabited remote areas. With this father-and-son story, especially through the metaphor of the orchard, He YUAN, a member of the Naxi people, one of the groups that inhabit the Jinsha River, Southwest of China, symbolizes the fate of traditional culture in a society in transition and evokes the gradual loss of a "heritage garden" (to copy the Chinese expression) with the disappearance of traditions.
- Festivals
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2009 Busan International Film Festival - Wide Angle
2011 Salaya International Documentary Film Festival - AND Showcase
- Still Cut
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