Floating Life

A Chinese family with five children has been divided, and in a desperate attempt to continue to keep them together the parents decide to emigrate from Hong Kong to Australia. It is where Bing, one of their daughters has been living for the past three years, she has now offered to let them stay with her. I t is not easy for the family to adjust to the new country and its culture. In particular, the parents find it difficult since two of the children are still living elsewhere, i.e. in Hong Kong and in Germany. Bing is a typical workaholic, her main goal is to be accepted as a white Australian woman. She has worked hard to gain a certain status is her new society; now, as her family has arrived, she is afraid of losing that position. Her mother's Chinese values and way of life are a threat to Bing in her new, self-assumed role. The tension between the two of them increases when Bing with every possible means tries to turn her two brothers into copies of herself: hard working, successful and white Australians. While the family is exposed to internal stress, the two siblings who are still abroad try to surmount their personal obstacles in order to be able to join the rest of the family in Australia. When they finally arrive in Sydney, they find the family disintegrated and their relationship worse than ever. Primarily, Floating Life is about a family that falls apart due to external as well as internal hardships. Bing, in her eager efforts to be something she is not, has lost her identity. She is trapped between two cultures and makes the mistake of trying to obliterate one of them since her belief is that they are impossible to combine. This painful process, i.e. her attempt to erase her past and to constantly deny her background leads to her utter collapse. Ironically, the only thing that can help her is what she is trying to avoid: her family. The portrayal of the cultural trap tile family is caught in and the children's desperate struggle to patch up their split identities makes Floating Life topical since this situation is a reality for many people, all-over the world, meet with. Even though the film portrays a specific family, the plot raises several general questions such as: Where do we come from? Are we not all immigrants? Is not everyone rootless in a society where technology reduces distances every day?

Premiärstatus
Skandinavisk premiär: Medverkande
Annette Shun Wah, Annie Yip, Anthony Wong: Producent
Bridget Ikin: Manus
Eddie L.C. Fong & Clara Law: Foto
Dion Beebe: Musik
Davood A. Tabrizi: Talat språk
English,C antonese, German