An unsteady hand holds the camera as it enters the apartment complex—up the dusty blackened stairs, through a plant-dotted balcony with iron bars wrought in floral shapes. With a right turn, the viewer follows the camera into a living room, where a woman is using a two-sided brush to dye the hair of a man before a television. Behind them, a teenage boy lies asleep.

Such is the lush and intricate visual poetry that opens All About ING, director Huang Zi’s first full-length feature film which won the 2019 Grand Jury Prize at the FIRST International Film Festival, China’s premier launching pad for new directors.

Huang has based the production on his own life. All About ING tells the story of the three members of the Ing family of Guangzhou, and their struggle to accept reality when a health hiccup for father Weiming (Hon-Man Ko) is diagnosed as late-stage liver cancer. Suppressed by the film’s terse storytelling, the pain of Weiming, along with mother Muling (Hang-Ying Pang) and son Yiming (Howard Sit) is given dignity by its understated nature, the three gradually finding the strength to make sense of the blow. “I hope that I can present what I didn’t do in reality—the ways I didn’t satisfy my father—in the film,” Huang told an audience at the Shanghai International Film Festival last July.

All About ING is divided into three chapters, each dedicated to one family member, the first focusing on the discovery of Weiming’s condition. Muling forbids doctors from telling Weiming his diagnosis—an act of kindness, or denial. At the same time, high school student Yiming is accepted into an American college, but keeps the news to himself in case his family can no longer afford it.

The film’s landscapes are all drenched with slow, wretched pain, from the urban labyrinth of Guangzhou to Weiming’s home village on a small island. But there is beauty amid the suffering: lavish camphor trees, woven with a cascade of ivy, stand silent along the streets; old neighborhoods that appear to slumber behind a blanket of mossy walls, guarded by shadowed iron gates from the last century. Though it is a drama, All About ING has the feeling of a documentary, with extensive use of hand-held cameras, long shots, and close-ups. Acted in Cantonese (rare for a film produced on the mainland), All About ING offers a down-to-earth view of Guangdong life.