Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles

Aroview: An unmistakably poignant, tear-jerking chronicle of an elderly Japanese man’s pilgrimage to Mainland China in the hope of reconciling a long-term estrangement with his dying son.

Reprising the heartfelt sentimentality of his pre-martial arts melodramas, dir. Zhang places the legendary Ken Takakura on a journey fraught with cultural roadblocks as he struggles to overcome Chinese prejudice and bureaucracy – a hostility that eventually thaws, allowing the elderly father to film a rarely performed opera for his son’s incomplete documentary. Through an intimate blend of compassion and humanism, Zhang foregrounds the relationship between fathers and sons (and the fracture between China and Japan), while any signs of overwrought sentiment are generally quashed by the film’s Asian-centric modesty.

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