Tsai Ming-liang ‘s latest sketchbook entry concerns his frequent star and collaborator Anong Houngheuangsy returning to his village in Laos, where he interacts with his family, Surat Houngheuangsy, Wijit Houngheuangsy, & Wankaew Houngheuangsy. Like the Paris’ Centre Pompidou Museum’s Où en êtes-vous? series or the Jeonju Film Festival Digital Shorts program that Tsai has contributed to in the past, Back Home is a small, even minor, entry in his body of work. But it’s precisely this “smallness” that makes the work so valuable. Tsai’s Walker series, over a decade in the mking, has already eschewed as much as the prestige festival circuit as is possible for a revered international auteur, and with works like Where are You, Tsai Ming-Liang?, Light, and (the much older) A Conversation With God, Tsai seems more than content to create non-commercial oddities that tickle his fancy, if no one else’s. These films won’t win any big prizes, but they are the sort of intermediate works that can help further elucidate the artist’s worldview for admirers. Like a novelist’s letters or the great painter’s charcoal sketches, inviting us into the process of thinking through ideas is sometimes as valuable as the end product. It’s a kind of invaluable intimacy.
Back Home begins with Tsai filming from the inside of a moving car. We see the road whizzing by outside, streetlights, and other trappings of urban density. He cuts to Anong asleep in the seat next to him, the lo-fi digital images replete with smeary artifacts and fuzzy blacks. This is our introduction to their return, although we’ll never learn exactly where or what they are traveling from (perhaps the glitz and bright lights of a special presentation or retrospective series of some sort). What follows is not any sort of traditional narrative; Anong doesn’t appear in many of the film’s shots, and there are only two brief dialogue sequences in the entire 60-minute runtime (neither of which are subtitled for non-native speakers). The film is instead a series of sensory impressions, discrete shots that all eventually add up to a slightly abstracted portrait of this particular time and place. Anong prepares food in ( what is presumably) the family home; children fly about on a whirling carnival ride while a dog attempts to flee between the quickly moving carts; a man tends a fire; workers carve, sand down, polish, and paint large Buddha head statues. But lest the compositions veer toward the one-note, there are also many shots of vast landscapes, rice paddies, natural rock formations, flowing streams, and any number of innately beautiful images.
It all amounts to a kind of moving image scrapbook, a travelogue of Tsai visiting this place and soaking in its rhythms. Critic Nick Pinkerton has called Tsai “a filmmaker of cities,” which is undoubtedly true — few have done more to chart the alienation of large urban spaces and late-stage capitalism in the late 20th and early 21st century. So it has been fascinating to see Tsai embrace the rural in recent years, as if he is exploring different modes and methods of being. One of Tsai’s earliest features is titled Give Me a Home, and it follows a family living in a construction work site desperately striving for a proper house in a vast urban space. That dream is likely impossible now for a huge swath of the population in any country, as modernity has progressed and left many of us behind. Back Home suggests, then, a different way of living, away from the hustle of the city and more closely attuned to nature. A dream, perhaps, and likely unrealistic for many people. But movies are made for showing us dreams.
Published as part of Venice Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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