Have You Eaten?
2020 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Lina Li
Genres: documentary, essay film, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Toronto student Lina Li returns to her family home in Thornhill, where conversation with her mother over home cooking touches on immigration, misunderstanding and affection.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a domestic essay film about a mother-daughter conversation—exactly the kind of thing that gets mistaken for profundity just because it's personal. But Li resists the obvious emotional payoff, letting the awkwardness and untranslated hurt sit unresolved, which is genuinely braver than the sentimental route everyone expects.
Li positions herself within a lineage of personal documentary and the essay film tradition—think Chloé Zhao or Agnes Varda's intimate portraiture—but grounds it in the specific grammar of Cantonese family dynamics and the immigrant kitchen as archive, which gives the formal quietness real weight.
The entire film turns on a single directorial choice: holding the camera on her mother's face during silences rather than cutting away, letting the viewer sit in the discomfort of what isn't being said—a decision that transforms a five-minute home video into something that actually earns its melancholy.