On November 17, the Dutch film Four Journeys by FilmForward Vrijplaats participant Louis Hothothot (Louis Yi Liu) opens the 34th edition of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.
Four Journeys is a personal film about the destructive influence of the one-child policy introduced in 1979 on a Chinese family. Filmmaker Louis Hothothot (Louis Yi Liu) was born in 1986 as an illegal second child. As punishment, his parents were fined three times his father’s annual salary, who also saw his further career shrouded. The devastating effects of his birth on his family left Louis with a biting sense of guilt. In his twenties he left for Amsterdam. Five years after he last saw his parents and sister, he visits them to unravel the family history.
Using the camera as a sometimes intimidating weapon, Louis forces his parents to confront their traumatic past, a past in which another undisclosed drama has occurred. He does not spare his parents. With confrontational questions and remarks, he wants to pull them out of the grueling past. Painful, but necessary, because: “If memories are frozen in the past, what can dissolve the pain?”