AN INVITATION
DIRECTED BY HAO ZHAO AND YEUNG TUNG
CHINA // 2020
13 MINS
In the Summer of 2008, an 8 year old boy pays a short visit to his father in Hong Kong, applying for permanent ID. As the visit comes to an end, they find it increasingly difficult to ask what they want from each other.
Reflective Encounters
“One might say that the main character in Yeung Tung & Has Zhao’s An Invitation (Fang Ke) is a word which remains unspoken. ‘Divorce’ is such one word that resists its own unharmful utterance, often scarring a lover’s stiffened lips with its certainty. Instead, the titular invitation seeks to heal the gaping wound of separation, when a father gets to spend a short time with his son in Hong Kong, as the boy usually stays with his mother in Mainland China. Being eight years old in 2008, the son himself is already born into a situation of in-betweenness. As a subject of the new millennium, he cannot dispense with the thousands-year-long traditions that have already shaped the world he was born in, even when the fireworks inaugurating the Olympic Games in Beijing mark a transition that can never truly end.
The film’s intricate attention to detail shapes it as a delicate work, stringing together fragments of a life in bits – an unanswered phone call, a misplaced comic book, an unfinished meal – are all instances when the camera looms over the props and decor as if asking the silent question: “Why?” Tung and Zhao present a life-affirming form of cinematic questioning and an elastic father-son bond that stretches and folds, tucked away in the silent pauses between ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’.”
— Savina Petkova
Filmmaker Q&A
A Q&A with filmmakers from The Space Between Us programme at Encounters Film Festival 2021.
Filmmakers - Yeung Tung & Has Zhao (An Invitation) and Vincent Tilanus (Marlon Brando)
Hosted by Gaia Meuci-Astley, Short Film Programmer
Director’s Statement
This story had been brewing in us ever since an unexpected summer trip shaped our lives for good. We seek to ruminate on a conversation that surrounds a subject of separation and its implications to a relationship.
The conversation about the divorce that occurred in the story never happened in real life. So in a way it’s about us asking our fathers a question we always wanted to ask. It doesn’t have to be answered, perhaps it can't be.
Fang Ke is personal but not biographical. It is nutured and inspired by our own memories of a not so distant past and our shared emotions towards the realtionship between a child and his/her parents in general.
We are privileged to witness a story between a father and a son taking shape in the most simple form: a boy longing for his father, and his father wanting him.
Filmmaker Bio
Hao Zhao is a Chinese director/screenwriter/cinematographer. Since completing his grad film education at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Hao has been working as an independent director, making short films and documentaries.
His previous shorts include Serve the People (2014), SHE (2013). His most recent short film Fang Ke, premiered at the 60th SEMAINE DE LA CRITIQUE Cannes Film Festival 2021. His feature directorial debut, 15 Seconds of Spotlight, was selected as a 2020 Shanghai International Film Festival Film Project Finalist. The film is about the end of a long journey of a teenaged goalkeeper to professional soccer as his window of opportunity closes. Hao is also working on a documentary feature in which he looks into the youth soccer development system in a small town near Shanghai.
Yeung Tung is a director/writer born and raised in Mainland China currently a Graduate Film MFA candidate at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. He completed his studies in Film and Television at Boston University's College of Communication where he began his directorial journey developing short films. Yeung directed several theatres works with the Red Star Theatre Club at Boston University as well as Wuming Theatre Club at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Yeung wrote and directed Fang Ke with Hao ZHAO. The film has been selected for the short film competition at the 60th SEMAINE DE LA CRITIQUE Cannes Film Festival 2021. Yeung’s next short film project, Strawberry Rider, will return to his hometown Zengcheng, China.
The story is about a delivery driver, "I," who fell into a dream after a random conversation with a strange woman. The story is inspired by Zhuangzi's "The Butterfly Dream," emphasizing the necessary connection among young generations in nowadays Chinese society and the lag of it.