After Spring, the Tamaki Family | White Cube Café & Studio
Films screened
After Spring, the Tamaki Family
The Tamaki family waited through many springs before reaching a late life of peace. About three hundred kilometres from Taiwan, in the Yaeyama Islands of Okinawa, a small island forgotten by history was where Taiwanese from the colony settled after migrating before the war. They lived through land clearance and conscription, forced repatriation during the war and the aftershocks of the 228 Incident, and finally became stateless political refugees under American administration, adrift for thirty years. Carried up and down by the currents of the age, the family, now more than a hundred people, is together again, and the children are planning to take their ageing mother back one last time to the home she left in her youth — Taiwan.
This is a family film spanning eighty years of hardship across East Asia. The Tamaki children have travelled far, and now their feast has come. It is not only one family's journey through memory but the shared history of drift of all the Taiwanese migrants of Yaeyama — like waves between two islands, striking back and forth without rest, the young figures of then now grown into the keepers of memory.
In the early spring of 2015, over a week of family holiday, the Tamakis follow their mother's fading memory onto a journey back to their roots that none of them had made before — a search about memory, identity and going home.
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