Tags: blog, film, drama, 2025, essential
Author: KickingK
Date: Thursday December 04th, 2025
Joyful and Triumphant
A new film from Shih-Ching Tsou and Sean Baker is always a highlight of the year.
Whilst their recent films have gradually expanded the narrative aspect, increasing the amount of plot and the runtime, this goes back to basics a little, re-focusing on what they do best.
Which is, quite simply, generate empathy.
We get to spend some time with a small family, moving back to Taipei and trying to make a life for themselves running a small noodle stand. There's nothing extraordinary in the plot to create drama or tension. It's all supplied by the characters and the never ending human ability to generate love and friction out of nothing.
Lord only knows how they manage to do this so effortlessly. It all seems so simple and easy. Like Shih-Ching Tsou just placed a camera and let everything play out. But if it were that simple, literally everyone would be doing it and these kind of films would be ten a penny. Only the incredible rarity of films as effective and moving as this indicates that it's a work of rare talent.
There is one revelation in the film which has already been done so dramatically by a UK soap opera that it's passed into British folklore. Which, admittedly, took me out of the scene and their lives for a moment.
But then at the end of the film, a look is exchanged. Lasting for a fleeting moment, barely more than a few frames, it reduced me to such a blubbering wreck that my mind and my heart are still with them and their beautiful, messy lives, days after the film finished.
