Boluomi

Film description

Nobody escapes their family story, even if emigration is on the table. The past is
a baggage you carry wherever you go, and the relationships between parents and their children is are the heaviest. The makers of "Boluomi" are weaving a tale combining two threads set over 60 years apart. In the contemporary Kaohsiung, Taiwan's second largest city, Wu Yi-fan, a young Malay of Chinese origins, is studying agriculture and working part-time in a restaurant, trying to find his way in the new reality. There, he meets Laila, a young cleaner from the Philippines.

Through flashbacks, we learn about the history of his family – Wu Yi-fan's father was born in the 1950s in the jungle, like many other children whose parents were fighting the British in a guerrilla war for the country's independence.

Lau Kek-Huat and Vera Chen skillfully move between the two narrative threads. Even though the father and the son appear together in only one scene, its emotional load and symbolism turns their complex relationship, filled with reproach, despise, and unspoken love, into the main axis of the movie.
The filmmakers also focus on the wider context of economic migration to Taiwan, a country hard to classify, located somewhere between the Global North and the Global South. The experience of migration painfully reveals the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege, and the class divisions marking some incomers as temporary cheap labor, and others as a welcome source of intellectual capital. Through showing the relationship between Laila and Wu Yi-fan, the filmmakers outline the possibility of creating a community of migrants – multinational and multi-ethnic communities could be the source of an inner strength and an alternative for isolation or the suffocating diasporas. In "Boluomi," reconstructing the individual story and finding the feeling of belonging in a new place are only possible outside urban spaces, through contact with nature, which possesses a mysterious power granting the access to the collective memory.

text:
Maja Korbecka