Trained in medical engineering, Qiu Sheng was not the first engineer to drop his discipline for filmmaking. Born in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province in eastern China, he studied filmmaking at the University of Hong Kong and, in 2018, released an ambitious debut feature, Suburban Birds, which only found its way to Chinese theaters belatedly. Audiences are now discovering this young director of My Father's Son, a delicate and deeply personal film, as often happens when a filmmaker chooses to explore, through fiction, the relationship between a father and a son.

Yes, the loss of my father was a turning point in my artistic growth. That loss made me more sensitive to the world's anomalies, to broken families, to the spirits that haunt the living. The summer after my father's death, I became addicted to video games and movies. I turned to images and sounds after losing a real person, searching for a substitute. I don't think it was a coincidence. That impulse to find substitutes is also present in My Father's Son.

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