Logline
Teenager Zou Qiao refuses to accept his father's death and leaves home to wander the city. After a long physical and spiritual journey, he finally finds a way to say goodbye to his father.
Dog Father
Creative Statement
As the saying goes, "A tiger father does not raise a dog son." What kind of child does a "dog father" have? How does the son see a "dog father"? Does he break free of his influence at all costs, or honor what he left behind? Amid this turmoil, the father takes on different forms, and the son keeps growing. The story comes from my own experience. I lost my father when I was 15. He had been my idol, and his sudden death left me lost; it took me a long time to find my own meaning in life. More than ten years later, I gradually learned more about him from my mother, and his halo faded. But some of the values he taught me still guide me, and his self-destructive temperament seems to affect me too. He still seems to exist, in an abstract form. With this film I hope to mourn my father and truly say goodbye to him.
Synopsis
Teenager Zou Qiao has just finished the college entrance exam when his mother takes him to the funeral home for his father's funeral. Zou Qiao cannot believe what is happening. While reading the eulogy he suddenly loses his voice and flees the funeral home in shame. The funeral is left unfinished, and his father's ashes remain at the funeral home. The next day, Zou Qiao takes his father's boxing gloves from the boxing gym and charges about the city. While his mother searches for him, he hides at the mahjong parlor run by Auntie Pan, his father's lover. She tells him that his father did not die of illness but drowned himself in the river, and Zou Qiao breaks down sobbing. That night by the canal, he sees an apparition of his father walking out of the water and cannot sleep. The next day he summons his courage, goes to the funeral home and takes the ashes. With the help of Chunli, a cosplay girl, he buries his father in a hidden cave by West Lake, and memories of his father come back. It was the summer Zou Qiao was ten. His father, Zou Jiantang, was owed money, deep in debt and spent his days at the mahjong parlor. His mother had gone back to her parents' home, demanding a divorce, leaving father and son to depend on each other. At a hospital checkup, his father found a shadow on his lung and knew his time was short. So every day he took Zou Qiao to box, hoping to make him a tiger of a son. After one session, father and son bathed together, and suddenly the father dissolved into a pool of water before the young Zou Qiao, as if in a dream. Waking from that long dream, Zou Qiao is past thirty and married to Chunli. Chunli is pregnant, but tests show a high chance the baby will have a deformity. Zou Qiao throws himself into developing an AI boxer to ease his pain. He spends his days in a VR world sparring and talking with a virtual boxer, telling it everything about his father. The virtual boxer, always listening, gradually comes to resemble his father more and more. Late one night, it steps out of the VR world and appears before him in his father's form. The two begin a bout in the empty lab, hitting, dodging and embracing, evenly matched. This is the last farewell between father and son.
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Genre:
Drama, Coming-of-age, Mystery -
Director:
Qiu Sheng
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Screenwriter:
Qiu Sheng -
Producer:
Han Tian | Dun He | Wang Huan (Hong Kong, China)