This is the story of a father going alone to an alien country with language difficulties and feeling of helplessness, only for finding a Chinese drama and keeping a record of it as the last gift to his dying son. It’s a simple story containing something thought provoking, and a lonely journey filled with warmth and hope.

As the keyword of this movie, the word “loneliness”, its connotation has been enlarged since the philosopher started to think. In this movie, it has been condensed as an insurmountable barrier being set between father and son, the locals and the foreigner, also the figures who lived under different living circumstances，and beyond the movie, the meaning of “loneliness” has been abstracted as an eternal weakness in the human’s moral being. You can say it’s so common to feel, or you can refute it’s too complex for us to know.

“People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about”, a quote from the great novelist Anton Chekhov, coincidently, the similar feeling of loneliness has been expressed by a great Chinese film director Mr. Zhang Yimou, through one simple story. The setting of this movie is a small village of Yunnan province in China, a beautiful city where has the magic to keep people away from sorrow and worries, in here a Japanese man tried to find a Chinese drama for his dying son, and the only way to accomplish it is to get permission to filming it in the prison, after overcoming all the difficulties happened during the whole case, the drama actor, who was being in prison, hadn’t met his son for a long time that made him almost fell apart while filming. The lives of the two men had been intertwined as a result of the guilt of the son, for the purpose of fulfilling his son’s wish the Japanese man had to get in touch with the prisoner’s son, a lonely and naughty boy, who finally made this father start to reflect on the relationship with his own son and being relieved in a few days.

Perhaps, the loneliness can help people to be more sober while they’re in trouble, and the passing of time can teach people how to sooth the pain. According to this idea, the depiction of father and son in this movie has not only aroused us emotionally, but to lead us to understand the purity of human nature, the complexity of the life.

As for the film art, how to make a good movie depends on the storyline, the photography, the music, and so on, the most important of which is the sincerity we should never lose. That’s what I see from the movie, and the great man whose name is Takakura Ken.