THE STORY – Director Tsai Ming-liang returns to his hometown in the rural areas of Laos.
THE CAST – Anong Houngheuangsy
THE TEAM – Tsai Ming-liang (Director)
THE RUNNING TIME – 65 Minutes
Premiering out of Competition at the 82nd Venice Film Festival, Tsai Ming-liang’s “Hui Jia (Back Home)” is minimalist cinema in its purest form. Stripped of narrative, dialogue, and even music, it plays like a hybrid of travelogue and video diary. The result is meditative but also divisive, likely to test the patience of all but Ming-liang’s most devoted admirers.
The film begins with a fleeting human presence: Anong Houngheuangsy, a friend of the director, dozing on a night bus. He is never identified on screen and appears only briefly thereafter. From that point, “Back Home” shifts almost entirely away from people. The few human figures who surface speak in untranslated dialogue, leaving viewers to assume their identities, possibly Anong’s relatives.
Instead, the film unfolds as a series of static shots capturing rural Laos: rice fields, wooden houses perched on stilts, flooded landscapes, temples, marketplaces, farmyards, and stretches of water. Natural sound provides the only soundtrack—traffic hum, barking dogs, rustling leaves—adding texture without context.
The standout sequence arrives early. A small dog, trapped at the center of a whirling fairground ride, repeatedly misjudges an escape attempt as children on swings swoop around it. The scene stretches on, building tension and sympathy, and it becomes the film’s most engaging moment. Elsewhere, animals appear—goats, cows, kittens, and one scene-stealing giant cat—but they mostly serve as visual punctuation rather than narrative anchors.
Visual repetition dominates: flooded paddies, crumbling homes, variations of domestic still life. Occasionally, Ming-liang’s playful eye for detail provides delight, as when an orange satellite dish mirrors the color of the earth, or a house’s paint blends seamlessly with surrounding foliage. There are also echoes of his earlier work, particularly in shots of watermelons that recall “Vive L’Amour” and “The Wayward Cloud.”
In the Venice press notes, Ming-liang describes his approach as “Handsculpted Cinema,” a filmmaking style freed from industrial constraints. With only a camcorder, a Leica camera, and a crew of three—including himself—he crafts an intimate, handcrafted project, later edited in Taipei by his long-time collaborator, Jhong-yuan Chang.
The experience of watching “Back Home” largely depends on one’s tolerance for its repetition and lack of narrative structure. At just 65 minutes, the film still feels prolonged and occasionally frustrating in its refusal to offer context or characters to hold onto. Yet for all its sparseness, it has moments of quiet beauty, fleeting humor, and unexpected poignancy. And yes, the dog steals the show.
