The Way

By Ferenc Moldovanyi

M.Liu is 65, and one of tens of thousands of Chinese living in Budapest, where he earns little money from a job in the Chinese market, the biggest in the Hungarian capital. M.Liu thinks his time in Budapest is the “spring of his life”. But he also lives in complete loneliness and as he says, he is still looking for ‘the Path’. His search is not only moral and philosophical, but very down to earth:  M. Liu returns to Beijing to meet the young woman he has chosen from the catalogue of a matrimonial agency and brings her back to Budapest to be his wife. While in Beijing, he sees his adolescent son, whom he left behind 6 years ago. His past catches up with him (a professor of literature, like many others he was a victim of the Cultural Revolution), and wounds him. The film covers a year in the life of M.Liu, and provides an intimate look at the greatest scattering of a people in the world:  the Chinese diaspora.