Reconnecting with family can be a wonderful or disastrous feat and A Holy Family follows Elvis Lu the director as he tries to reconnect with his family after moving away over 20 years ago. We get to see a brother start a tomato farm and has a talent of being a medium, a father who is a gambler as well as being in poor health and a stubborn mother. The film explores the idea of Elvis being detached from his family and in essence being a stranger to them and from there seeing them reconnect and slowly become to understand and love each other. In Elvis’s eyes, his family only contact him when they are needing financial help, and this is why he is quite reluctant to be in contact with his family. He sees his father’s gambling addiction as a constant drain on the family’s finances. We see through the film his mother’s continual ritual of cleaning the spiritual room which requires her to carry buckets of water up many stairs, this is itself a full-time job. This film held a deeper meaning for me and showed the struggle of the female side of the family and the constant work they are required to put in daily, to the way that the parents give the other brother the last of the life insurance and Elvis is given nothing. To the fact that his mother has never seen the sea. Elvis does reconnect with his family before the passing of his father, and the film ends with Elvis taking his mother to see the ocean. It’s an emotional roller-coaster of a film that was truly insightful and special.
