Tender Ties, Broken Bonds – MulanIFF2025

Author: SHEN Wei

This year’s “Lili vs Leviathan” programme presents four films that each approach the parent-child dynamic from a distinct angle, peeling back layers of intimacy, duty, and unspoken pain. The performances are textured and deeply felt—at times so raw they leave us breathless.

In Montages of a Modern Motherhood, a young mother’s descent into postpartum depression is rendered with unflinching intimacy. Pavane for an Infant traces the agonizing choice of single mothers forced to give up their child. In Fly Me to the Moon, a daughter tries desperately to magnify a threadbare sense of paternal love—only to find that even distance cannot sever their emotional entanglement. All Quiet at Sunrise follows a son facing his terminally ill mother, and another mother who refuses to give up searching for her missing daughter.

Spanning Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and Hangzhou, these films unfold in vastly different linguistic, cultural, and economic landscapes. Across the variations in how love is expressed—through words, silence, gestures—a universal question emerges: how do parent-child relationships leave such indelible marks on our lives?

Societies tend to project neat images of family, offering ready-made templates for what these bonds should look like. But lived reality resists such framing. Responsibility, often treated as a given, cannot always be fulfilled by willpower. These films aren’t merely critiques of social norms; rather, they circle back to something deeply human: a reconsideration of parenthood and childhood as relationships that are never fully voluntary.

Cinema doesn’t promise solutions. It invites us to sit with the messiness, the grief, the ambiguity––for a fleeting moment. To see these four films emerge around the same time feels rare. Perhaps it’s no coincidence. Perhaps filmmakers have sensed a deeper undercurrent—and are gently rattling the hollow, crumbling codes of familial virtue.