Between faded family photographs, old video footage, and interviews collected through the years, Alvin Tsang's REUNIFICATION bears the look and feel of a documentary that's taken decades to produce. Perhaps it required all that time for Tsang to fully process his family's history and confront his own emotionally turbulent upbringing. For the audience though, that passing of time is key to the film's powerful portrayal of tireless emotional reconciliation. When his mother and two siblings first immigrated from Hong Kong to Los Angeles in the early 1980s, six-year-old Alvin was forced to stay behind with his working, and consequently absent, father. Spending the following three years often alone in an empty apartment, he longed for his family's reunification. However, upon Alvin and his father's arrival to America, that dream was utterly and permanently shattered under circumstances the filmmaker has yet to fully comprehend to this day. REUNIFICATION is Tsang's self-reflexive ...
