THE FAMILY / JIA

Nearly omnipresent from start to finish, Liu Lijie and Deng Shoufang deliver remarkably natural turns as the ailing pensioners fretting about the well-being of their adult offspring. Their cross-country journey begins just as they seek to help their eldest daughter Liqin (Huang Liqin), a divorced schoolteacher and single parent with whom they live in the same creaking apartment, finish the decoration of her new flat. Spurred on by the need to discuss this with their other two children, the couple decide to leave home to pay everybody a visit.
Liu and Deng find themselves taking up a front row view of how lives are lived in China in the here and now. Leaving their middle-sized, non-descript home city in the landlocked province of Jiangxi, the couple get to observe the lives of their port manager daughter Xiaomin (Liu Xiaomin) in the seaside city of Fuzhou; then it's onwards to Shanghai, where their youngest son Xujun (Liu Xujun) struggles to get by alongside his wife.