After premiering at TIFF two years ago, Chinese director Zhang Yang's Sunflower finally gets a local release. Yang's previous feature, Quitting, was a work of dexterous (and occasionally distracting) self-reflexivity, but Sunflower's elegant style serves its decades-spanning narrative rather than overwhelms it.

In 1976, eight-year-old Xiangyang (Zhang Fan) is reunited with his father, Gengnian (Sun Haiying), an artist released from a labour camp in the wake of Mao Tse-Tung's death. It's an emotional reunion tinged by an unexpected tragedy that at once binds Xiangyang to his father and pushes them apart. The contours of this drama are finely traced (even if their ultimate destination is predictable), and the roaming yet precise camera work gives the proceedings a sense of momentum even as Yang's focus remains becomingly intimate.