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