My Ba's Radio
2017 · 10m · Malaysia
Directed by Victor Chen Yee Fei
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
An ailing father, living in a bubble of his own, keeps finding connection with his deceased wife through a small radio - much to the disapproval of his adult son, who has returned from the city to take care of him.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's competent enough—grief, radio, dead wife—but it lands exactly where you expect it to, and there's nothing here subverting the family-drama formula enough to make me care that it does it well.
A formally precise chamber piece that understands the syntax of intimate loss; the restraint in how it frames the father's communion with absence, and the son's rationalist resistance, feels situated in a long lineage of family portraiture done with considerable discipline.
The decision to let the radio become the actual emotional anchor—not the son's conflict, not the father's decline, but the *object itself* as presence—is what elevates this from routine into something genuinely affecting; Chen Yee Fei trusts that small, specific choice to carry the whole weight.