The Way Home discusses the impact of cultural shifts on personal and collective identity and the conflicting emotions that people often experience in the post-colonial era. In the movie, the protagonist navigates an abandoned European-style town in China, reflecting on the stark contrast between his utopian childhood imagination of the town and his current disillusionment.

The film was shot in the largest abandoned mall in China, a European-style town built during the height of this imitation wave. It reveals how China‘s embrace of globalization spurred a fascination with Western lifestyles, leading to a wave of European-style architectural imitations in the new millennium. Yet many of these flawed and ephemeral imitations eventually became relics of a bygone era. Grew up in a former French colony town, this film discusses my conflicting emotions of nostalgia and disenchantment in the post-colonial era.

This work was originally planned as a film of about 40 minutes, and the current description was written for that fuller version. However, when the shoot was nearly complete, my SD card was confiscated. In the end, the only material that survived was on a backup card I had secretly hidden, which contained about 10 minutes of empty landscape footage. As a result, the film eventually became a short film with a brief voiceover.

Link to View