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Review

His father's death brings a young man home from the city to the small village of his birth. His journey is a catalyst for memory, as he recalls oft-told stories of his parents' initial meeting, when his father came from the city decades earlier to become the village schoolteacher -- the post he would hold all his life. Through unwanted separations resulting from the political upheavals of the time, his parents' courtship lasts several years, taxing but never breaking their commitment. His mother's profound grief and her insistence on following traditional burial rites highlight the generational distance between mother and son. Her determination to preserve the old ways, despite everyone's preference for modern practicality, affords her husband's former pupils the opportunity to express their profound respect, to acknowledge their compassionate teacher's final life passage. Lyrcial and tender, The Road Home is a deceptively simple story; one of two people inextricably bound together in the face of massive historical forces and thousand-year-old traditions, who seem to unite solely through a force of will. (Mandarin wih English subtitles)