WEI-HUA LAN, JING-HUA TSENG IN FAMILY MATTERS

PAN KE-YIN: FAMILY MATTERS (2025) New York Asian Film Festival 2025

Coping

Taiwanese filmmaker Pan Ke-yin's feature debut grows out of his 2021 short My Sister, was made by his own company Ke-Yin Film, and utilizes the same cast. The feature is divided into four segments set in four time periods, each one focusing on a member of the Hsiao family, sister, mother, brother, father in turn, who have names corresponding to the season in which their focused story takes place. It must be observed that I did not really believe any of this for a minute, and there is no consistency of tone whatsoever. But the very harshness and simplicity gives the film a surreal quality that is not without possibilities. One thinks of Yourgos Lanthimos. The effect is of a series of interlocking short stories, recounting memorable moments in connected lives.

The first two segments, for the daughter and the mother, are both rather tense and grim: they are facing difficult problems. The third focused on a handsome young man about to do military service or go to university but with no problems yet and the world ahead of him, seems like a lark, except that he has no father. The last goes back to the first ones but, focused on the gambling father's downfall, is even grimmer.

In the first segment, Spring, the elder sister, discovers she is adopted, sending her world into turmoil and intensifying her already strained relationship with her mother, Autumn. This leads into Autumn’s arc, set in the past, where her and her husband’s efforts to conceive a son result in him asking his more stable (and fertile) friend Yuan to be a donor. When Yuan refuses to help a second time when Autumn has a miscarriage, she threatens him with her knowledge that he is gay.

The third story then shifts to the good looking younger brother, Summer, who, after graduating high school and during a regional water shortage, ends up working as a manager at Yuan’s motel. Yuan doesn't seem to know Summer has only just finished high school, though his claim to the staff that the youth has long management experience in Taipei must be a conscious lie. Summer films a longtime employee stealing from the till, but when he tries to show it to Yuan his phone won't work. During this segment Winter, the father, is gone, Summer telling Yuan the lie that his dad is managing a factory in Vietnam.

For the last segment we go back to a few years earlier when Winter, the father, is still on the scene. We knew that there was not much money. Now we realize that he has been gambling it away, perhaps to escape from the bad news that he has a low sperm count - the reason for the difficulty Autumn had getting pregnant. Addiction has at this point broken this family. Winter has not been working at his job for three months but has been pretending he is. There is not much love lost in this family. It's the rainy season, and at one point Summer is sick with a fever of 101º. He disowns his father when the latter, upset over gambling losses, stages a hostile and embarassing scene. The mother also turns on him. The film attempts a mix of pathos and warmth with a final year's end Lunar New Yeart ceremony of just the three of them, when the father has checked out, and there was no grieving.

Dramatic scenes, all these, but rather on the schematic side. Think the flash-forwards on Dickens' "A Christmas Carol." The effect is partly realistic, partly experimental.

Family Matters 我家的事 (Wǒjiā de shì, My Family's Affairs), 99 mins., in Mandarin, premiered at Osaka Mar. 15, 2025. Screened for this review as part of the July 11-17, 2025 New York Asian Film Festival. It will be in compettion for the Uncaged Award at its 24th edition.
SCHEDULE:
Saturday July 26, 1:30pm
SVA Theatre
2025 NYAFF Uncaged Award Nominee. Intro and Q&A with director Pan Ke-Yin

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.