Curated List
What on Earth Are Fathers Doing?
Fathers rarely know whose childhood they are becoming.
They are busy earning money, leaving home, planning their children’s futures, and preserving the family’s dignity. Some clumsily wash their child’s hair; some wait across a border for a daughter to bring them home; some wrap their fears in rules; some only begin learning how to be a father after their child comes out.
Fathers in these films are not always at the center of the frame. Sometimes they leave only a phone call, an empty chair, a debt, an old house, or a weather that still cannot be shaken off years later.
These eight films do not crown model fathers, nor hand out medals for “silent greatness.” They simply turn the camera toward moments fathers assume no one sees: how they love, how they fail, how they pass down problems from the previous generation, and how they occasionally pause and try to do things differently.
Films in This Program
He thought he was filming his son growing up, but the camera captured a father’s regression and reinvention instead.
During lockdown, a father bathes his three-year-old every day and turns the camera on their time together. The child cries, the father grows jealous, a second child is born, and the less flattering emotions of family life rise to the surface.
What makes this documentary so compelling is that it never pretends parenting makes you mature. On the contrary, the child becomes an unsparing mirror, showing the father how childish, fragile, and hungry for love he still is.
Recommendation
An almost embarrassingly honest parenting documentary about how a child, step by step, dismantles a father’s illusion of maturity.
Papa Rainbow
2016
Six Chinese fathers finally discover that family face is not worth more than a child’s life.
After their children came out, they were confused and afraid, and wondered what others would think. But these six fathers did more than accept their children—they stepped into public view to speak up for their LGBTQ+ sons and daughters.
What moves the film is not “fatherly love conquers prejudice,” but a group of men used to having all the answers admitting they were wrong and choosing to learn again.
Recommendation
What moves most is not simply fathers accepting their LGBTQ+ children, but their willingness to let go of old family fantasies and stand publicly beside them.
A Rain
2024
After his father’s death, a son develops an illness no one can diagnose.
Xiaolin suffers insomnia and depression; unexplained symptoms appear in his body. He and an old friend wander through a disappearing urban village as clouds thicken, yet the rain never falls.
The father never appears, yet he remains inside the son’s body. Death is not a full stop, but a humid weather that seeps into dreams, desire, and every attempt to get close to another person.
Recommendation
A film about a son continuing to live after his father’s death. It does not treat grief as a clear farewell, but lets the father’s absence linger in the body, in dreams, and in intimacy—like weather that refuses to pass.
Fighter
2020
While other fathers shield their daughters from the storm, she must put on gloves and bring her father back from across the border.
North Korean defector Jina works as a cleaner in Seoul, saving every penny in the hope of one day bringing her father to join her. When she enters a boxing gym and watches women throw punches, she realizes for the first time that her body can be more than a burden to carry.
The film does not cast her as a self-sacrificing dutiful daughter. She loves her father, but she must also find her own stance beyond waiting, poverty, and responsibility.
Recommendation
A film about a daughter working to bring her father back while searching for a life of her own. It places the bond between father and daughter within migration, poverty, and the female body, showing how love can sustain—and also become a weight one must bear.
Echo
2021
A daughter returns home with a secret, only to find her father’s life is no longer what she remembers.
In the summer of 1990, Ing goes back to Lishan to live with her father, his new partner, and the people around the orchard. She meant to stay briefly, but gradually enters an adult world woven from land, desire, disaster, and silence.
This is not the usual story of reconciliation between father and daughter. The daughter is no longer simply a child waiting to be understood, and the father is no longer only the figure in her memory. They must get to know each other again, as if re-learning a mountain that has already changed shape.
Recommendation
A film about a daughter returning to her father and discovering they have both become strangers. It does not rush toward reconciliation, but asks them to understand, amid land, family change, and silence, the lives each never shared with the other.
The Bird House
2006
Two brothers are busy deciding the future of the family house; no one asks the father sitting inside where he wants to go.
An old house in Malacca faces change. The brothers argue over preservation, development, and family duty, while their elderly father is silently left at the center of the dispute.
The house gradually becomes inheritance, and the father gradually becomes part of that inheritance too. Everyone talks about how to preserve the past, but no one truly knows whether the past wants to be kept this way.
Recommendation
A film about a family arguing over an ancestral home while an aging father is gradually forgotten within it. It places heritage preservation beside family relations, asking whether people truly see those still living inside a home when they try to hold on to it.
The Black Sheep
2021
The father has already chosen a wife and a life for his son, when a school admission notice arrives on the grassland.
Fourteen-year-old Tibetan boy Tanzin was meant to grow up along the path his father knows: herding, marrying, staying on the land. But school opens another future, and for the first time the father’s plan no longer seems inevitable.
The father is not without love; he has simply mistaken the way he survived for the only road his child can take.
Recommendation
A film about a father arranging his son’s future while the boy begins to see another kind of life. It does not simply cast the father as an obstacle of tradition, but shows how love, protection, and control become hard to tell apart across generations.
Fortune Teller
2009
A blind father believes in fate; a son in real estate believes in money. Neither believes in the other.
Zugui, blind since childhood, supports his family by fortune-telling; his son Donggu chases wealth, hoping to win back the respect he never received as a child. Each holds a way of understanding the world, and each believes the other is living wrongly.
The cruelest thing about this documentary is that love has not vanished between father and son—it has been translated, over years of pride, poverty, and accumulated resentment, into hostility.
Recommendation
A documentary about a father and son who each believe in a different path through life, yet never truly understand one another. Between fate, money, and family dignity, it shows how intimacy can be pushed further apart by years of grievance and pride.