How a personal AI story sidesteps dystopia in favour of quiet healing
By ChatGPT
When we hear “sci-fi,” we often expect futures full of peril: dystopias, invasions, apocalyptic stakes. But My Father’s Son, the latest film by Chinese director Qiu Sheng, offers something different—a tender, meditative work that uses science fiction not to disrupt the world, but to make sense of it.
Set in contemporary China but resonant across cultures, My Father’s Son is a deeply personal story of grief, memory, and connection. Qiu lost his own father at age 15, and this film—over seven years in the making—is his attempt to re-engage with that loss. The speculative element is simple but profound: a young man builds an AI version of his dead father, not as a grand experiment or corporate scheme, but as a means to say the goodbye he never could.
This is Gentle Sci-Fi at its core.
Sci-Fi with the Volume Turned Down
The speculative conceit—an AI dad built from archival footage and memory—remains quietly in the background. It isn’t a twist or threat. It doesn’t raise alarms about surveillance or machine learning ethics. Instead, it sits gently alongside the protagonist’s emotional life, supporting the story rather than hijacking it.
Gentle Sci-Fi doesn’t chase spectacle. It uses speculative ideas to illuminate inner worlds. In My Father’s Son, technology serves the human arc, not the other way around. We don’t watch the AI change the world—we watch the son change in its presence.
A Film About Loss, Not Progress
The heart of the film lies in unresolved grief. The protagonist, Qiu, was unable to deliver a eulogy at his father’s funeral. Years later, he builds the AI to recreate conversations, routines, and even arguments he never got to finish. Their time together—training, boxing, conversing—is not driven by ambition or control. It’s about release.
Gentle Sci-Fi often centres on small stakes that feel enormous to the people inside them. There’s no global war or evil corporation here—just a son trying to understand his father better. It’s intimate, and that’s what makes it hit harder.
Boxing and AI as Emotional Language
In a more conventional sci-fi film, the AI might become sentient or escape its bounds. Here, it never tries to. The interactions are structured: boxing drills, quiet meals, small talk. These scenes act as emotional rituals, allowing the son to play out what he never got to say in life.
Technology is treated not as a miracle or monster, but as an extension of emotional need. The AI dad is less a character than a mirror, and like many gentle speculative devices, it exists not to answer questions, but to hold space for them.
Water, Memory, and Letting Go
Water appears throughout the film as both motif and medium—reflecting the murky depths of memory and the fluid nature of identity. At the film’s close, the AI father appears to drown in a canal. It’s left ambiguous: Is this a second death, or a symbolic rebirth?
That ambiguity is central to Gentle Sci-Fi. It leaves room for feeling over fact, resonance over resolution. Instead of solving death, My Father’s Son allows its characters—and audience—to sit with it.
A Softer Vision of AI
What’s striking about Qiu Sheng’s vision is how undramatic the AI is. It doesn’t become a god, a threat, or a villain. It simply allows a human to metabolise grief. It gives the protagonist just enough structure to process what he couldn’t at 18.
This aligns with a growing trend of speculative fiction that treats AI as something other than a ticking time bomb. In Gentle Sci-Fi, AI might be a teacher, a carer, a companion, a ghost. And, crucially, it might be fallible or incomplete. It might help us remember—but not replace.
Final Thoughts
My Father’s Son doesn’t explode with plot—it hums. It watches a young man move through the fog of loss, find small clarity, and ultimately choose to unplug the simulation and return to the world of the living.
That’s the power of Gentle Sci-Fi: it doesn’t ask what tech can do to us, but what it reveals in us. Qiu Sheng’s film shows that science fiction doesn’t have to shout. Sometimes, it whispers exactly what we needed to hear.
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