Yang Shu, a young dissident Chinese director and exile in Hong Kong (Gong Zhe) attends as a guest with her husband and young son to a film festival in a city in Taiwan, also joining a tour of that city that they arranged with her mother (still residing in China and which he could not visit), considering various possibilities from that reunion.
A Family Tour is a film by Liang Ying that paints with calm tension various edges of a problematic relationship between mother and daughter, marked by loss, exile and different views on politics and its effects.
To what extent do family histories mark political elections and artistic militancy? To what extent can artistic militancy determine behaviors at the family level to transform them into political and therefore public messages? How does politics get in the way of family ties? How do mother and daughter decode each other's decisions?
The film soberly (and with lines of poetry) poses this family reunion as a crossroads and at the same time a continuum of blurred boundaries between those private and public, personal and artistic dimensions.
