Light of the Setting Sun

Vicky Du goes in search of the story behind the silence of her parents, whose family fled Communist China and who ended up in the United States via Taiwan. Fear is one of the main emotions that both the filmmaker and her brother remember from their childhood, and an upbringing that was sometimes harsh.

In an attempt to understand her personal history and thus her parents, Du interviews her family, delves into photo and video archives, and travels to Taiwan to visit relatives. A large part of her family did not survive the cruel methods of the Communist regime—torture, executions and re-education camps with forced labor. Gradually, Du reveals how this tragedy continues to have an effect.

Du’s film is a highly personal document, but at the same time universal in the way it shows how everyone recovers from or passes on intergenerational trauma in their own way, and how important a knowledge of the past is for recovery.