A Holy Family

About Story

Director Ah-Liang returns to his hometown in a remote village after 20 years of absence. Reconfronting his family, he found that the people and things that forced him to escape remain unchanged. The elder brother, who has been psychic since elementary school, along with twelve gods, made faith the salvation but also a curse for the family. From silence to slowly speaking out, Ah-Liang records what happens during this reunion day after day and gradually realizes that his absence is also a wound for the family that is hard to mend.

About Movie

A Holy Family won four awards at the 2022 Taipei Film Awards: the Grand Prize, Best Documentary, Best Editing, and Audience Choice Award, the last of which particularly excited director Elvis Lu Ying-Liang, and the film was also the first documentary to win these awards. Recently, the film was nominated for Best Documentary Feature and Best Film Editing at the Golden Horse Awards. Lu humbly calls himself a “freelance documentary filmmaker.” 28 years ago, he left Minxiong, Chiayi to pursue his dream of filming in Taipei by taking on diverse assistant jobs for a living, with the hope of pursuing further studies. Movie theater was his favorite place during his time off. Filmmaking was the reason for him to leave and also to return home. After making documentaries for long years, he received a phone call from his mother and began the journey of A Holy Family. Through the film, he finally found a way to restart a dialogue with his family.

Made after Lu’s first documentary feature, The Shepherds, A Holy Family took 4 years to complete. The shooting started in 2018; Lu brought a camera home with the intention to watch his family through the lens. Unexpectedly, the initial shooting was selected into the TAICCA Work-In-Progress Creative Award for Documentary at Golden Horse FPP Taiwan in 2019, which greatly encouragement to Lu and his team and also laid a solid foundation for the first step in developing A Holy Family into a feature film! For the cinematography, Lu acted as a cinematographer along with two cinematographers, Chou Wen-Chin and Chen Chang-Kuang who were ideal partners for Lu and contributed to building a complete film structure.

Huang Yi-Ling, the editor of A Holy Family, won the Best Editing at the Taipei Film Awards. The films she edited include Wansei Back Home, Sunflower Occupation, Jump! Men, and Me and My Condemned Son, and was nominated for the Golden Bell Award for Best Editing with Baseball in Taiwan: A Tale of Hundred Years (Episode 6: Standing at the Crater). For A Holy Family, the abundant materials and images were a challenge for Lu in deciding the parts to include and edit. Huang Yi-Ling kept the essence through careful insights, achieving an unpretentious but heart-warming style which moved the audience and jury.

Other behind-the-scenes heroes who made A Holy Family sincere and touching include the scorer Point Hsu with a background similar to that of the director. He was also a young man from a town in the south who chased his dream in Taipei, underwent the same youthful confusion, stumbled in pursuing his dreams, and knew the ups and downs of life in a foreign land. When these feelings are turned into images and musical notes, they also become emotions poured to each other, flowing thinly in the film, leaving incisions and indescribable thrills.