The family portrait is a quasi-ritualistic practice producing memories of family gatherings and smiling faces. The process of sitting, chatting, laughing, arguing, fades away with the sound of a shutter clicking. The rows and tears that are part of everyday family life are forgotten or hidden. In Family Phobia (2010), Hu Xinyu, however, offers those tearful real-life dramas in his own extended family through his nearly decade-long first person ‘gazing’ at home, assisted by his amateur DV camera.

The film is compiled from Hu's home videos starting from a family gathering during the 2003 Chinese Spring Festival. As an amateur and independent filmmaker who is passionate about recording life with a DV camera, Hu is conscious of documenting every minute of his family life, but without a clear idea initially of what kind of film he wants to make. The film records the mundane everyday life of Hu's parents, sisters and brother, and nephew and nieces, in a small statesubsidised flat in Xuqing, a third-tier post-industrial city in Shanxi Province, north China.

Hu Xinyu is among the first group of amateur DV filmmakers to emerge in China at the dawn of the twenty-first century. He received no professional training in filmmaking, and works as a music teacher in a provincial college. He was introduced to the field of filmmaking through being an actor in Jia Zhangke’s film Unknown Pleasures (2002), which recruited some non-professional actors. Working with a small crew filming on video, he realised that filmmaking did not require high level qualifications; therefore he bought a DV camera and started filming his close friends and family (author's interview with Hu, 2010).