Father to Son

The UCLA Film & Television Archive presents classic film and contemporary cinema in the Hammer's Billy Wilder Theater. Archive tickets are $9 general admission and free for UCLA students.

Los Angeles premiere

Bittersweet and beautiful, Father to Son finds beneath the vibrant illuminations of a hardware store the quiet trembling of an old soul. The store’s purveyor, Van, is turning 60 and he’s got the body of an old cowboy: rugged but not as tough as he might like to believe. Around him, his peers are confronting their mortality, and so, with the opportunity to connect with a young adult son and to travel to Japan, he reluctantly confronts his own mortality, along with the emotional toll of intergenerational inheritance—of genes, baggage, lies. Sensitively told through characters who mirror each other and journeys that echo those taken years ago, writer-director Hsiao Ya-chuan depicts a man realizing that ignoring the future is as impossible as brushing aside the past. (2018, dir. Hsiao Ya-chuan, DCP, color and black and white, Taiwanese, Mandarin, and Japanese with Chinese and English subtitles, 115 min.)