The Film That Captures a Different Kind of Isolation
This story contains spoilers for the film Tigertail.
Four years ago, the writer-director Alan Yang took the immigrant child’s rite of passage: He went “home.” He’d been to Taiwan before, but that was when he was 7 years old. After an entire adult life away, Yang felt more than ready to head back with his father to their family’s hometown of Huwei—a rural community southwest of Taipei whose name, in English, translates to “Tigertail.”
As the pair journeyed across Taiwan by high-speed rail, Yang peppered his father with questions about growing up. After winning an Emmy for co-writing —a sweet, funny vignette about the sacrifices immigrants make for their children—Yang had begun working on a loosely autobiographical script he titled “Family Movie,” and he needed help. His father obliged: When they arrived in Huwei, he took Yang to pay respects to late relatives at the mausoleum and showed him the sugar factory where
