Review: Road’s End in Taiwan
- Maria Nicollier chooses Taiwan, its lush nature and its contradictions, as the setting for her film, a family road movie led by three brothers who nevertheless don’t know each other
Presented as a world premiere at the 2025 Solothurn Film Festival where it is competing for the Audience Award, Road’s End in Taiwan [+see also:
interview: Maria Nicollier
film profile] depicts the eventful adventure of three brothers forced to share a family history of which they only know fragments. Almost entirely shot on the winding roads of Taiwan (this is the first ever co-production between Switzerland and Taiwan), the film is built around the personalities of Damien (Pierre-Antoine Dubey), born in Taiwan but raised in Geneva by his photographer mother, his older brother Steven (Rhydian Vaughan) who was raised (against his will) by their English father in Taiwan, and Yishang (Elliot Malvezzi), the younger brother.
The unlikely trio comes together after Damien, upset by the news of his father’s death, discovers that an inheritance is awaiting him and thus decides to go to Taiwan to sort out a family history he believes in less and less. What is the truth hidden behind the figure of his father who, as his mother always said, should have died many years ago? What seemed like a journey to be undertaken alone, however, soon turns into a choral adventure. Indeed, without everyone’s signature, the father’s inheritance can’t be divided.
The motivations of the three brothers are however different: Damien wants to put together the pieces of a childhood he knows little about, Steven wishes to give up on a company that is about to go bankrupt and open a restaurant, and Yishang dreams of being able to afford a “new” eye. And yet, what brings them together is the desire to put an end to a painful family history. Crammed into Steven’s van like sardines, the three characters set out in search of the father’s last wife. Despite reticences and their inability to talk about truths that still burn like open wounds, Damien, Steven and Yishang must, in spite of themselves, learn and get to know each other, in order to weave bonds that seemed broken forever. Surrounded by lush nature that seems to caress them and instill in them a strange sense of peace, the three of them face their differences, with the influence that living in different places, in different cultures and with different values has had on them. The film then makes us reflect on the relative importance of so-called blood relations as compared to the strength of chosen and claimed relationships, built with patience and perseverance. Their differences and the negative influence that the father, violent and selfish, has had on their lives, also makes us reflect on the drifts of toxic masculinity, the dread of opening up to a cathartic fragility for fear of losing even just a few crumbs of one’s own “virility”.
Never overly “feel good” yet still always delicately enjoyable and well structured, Road’s End in Taiwan depicts the need to know one’s own story in order to finally love oneself a little more.
Road’s End in Taiwan was produced by Swiss outfit REC Production together with Taiwanese company Serendipity Films.
(Translated from Italian)
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