From Home to the World: Women’s Cinema and the Many Lives It Portrays
Written by Howard Yang Hao-Chun
Translated by Cheng Yi
As Taiwan’s only film festival centered on women filmmakers and women’s perspectives, WMWIFF presents a diverse selection of 19 finalists in this year’s “Taiwan Competition” program. Moving beyond intimate, personal narratives, these works engage with a wide range of contexts, from geopolitical conflicts and transnational labor to the legacies of the Cold War. They reveal how the vision of Taiwanese women filmmakers has long since expanded beyond explorations of the private sphere through the lens of “the personal is political.” Turning their attention to questions of nationhood, history, and gender, these filmmakers examine how grand narratives sway the course of individual lives, while mounting incisive critiques of conventional notions of family and nation and the patriarchal structures that sustain them.
Gen Z “Eldest Daughters”: Coming-of-Age Narratives Beyond Family Trauma
Drawing on a sociological perspective, writer Chang Hui-tzu’s Eldest Daughter Syndrome portrays generations of Taiwanese daughters from blue-collar backgrounds, many of whom grow up deprived of care and a voice of their own. Under the pressures of gendered expectations, they internalize self-sacrifice as a virtue and spend their lives burdened with the responsibility of caring for others.
Many of the selected titles center on a new generation of girls caught in similar circumstances. Forced to grow up too soon in single-parent or dysfunctional families, they protect their loved ones with bodies still young and vulnerable. Yet even when left to fend for themselves, they refuse to remain victims of the structures that constrain them. With tenderness or fury, each struggles to break free from the hold of the family they were born into and claim a life of her own.
Siān-sûn Tiunn’s Tied Together delves into the moving bond between sisters in a family where the elder daughter takes on a maternal role in the absence of their parents. Through delicate camerawork and staging, the film portrays two adolescent half-sisters weathering the pains and regrets of growing up side by side. Hsin-Hsuan Lin’s short film So Far So Good, meanwhile, takes as its starting point a girl preparing Lunar New Year’s Eve dinner with her father and going out to buy dumpling wrappers. Through these ordinary domestic scenes, it reveals the differences in values between an independent eldest daughter and her traditional father. As they navigate the tension between familial obligations and personal choice, they find their way toward a heartwarming reconciliation.
Yet for these girls, coming of age is not simply a matter of learning to support and embrace others. Just as often, it begins with an awakening of anger against patriarchy—a coming of rage. Neverland turns to the brutal childhood of a girl in rural Taiwan, using precise jump cuts and compositions to build toward an eldest daughter’s revolt against her abusive father. With boxing as its point of departure, A Dance With Rainbows follows a teenage girl who, after her faith in male role models—including her father and coach—crumbles, discovers her own worth amid grief and rage. The queer animation You Are Not Part of the Cake, meanwhile, unleashes a bloody fantasy in which the protagonist literally “dismembers” her partner’s homophobic father, dismantling patriarchal control. Together, the three films offer vivid, full-bodied portraits of girls coming into their rage.
Among these portraits of youth, the feature documentary Second Round stands out. Director Chen Kuan-chun opens with the premise of “a girl becoming a man,” bringing to the screen a young trans man—a subject rarely represented in Taiwanese cinema. Following him through a nonlinear chronology, the film bears witness to his difficult journey toward reconciliation with both himself and his mother, and to a transformation made extraordinary by the chance to “live the second round.” At a time when public discourse has become increasingly charged with transphobic anxiety, Second Round offers an exceptionally valuable testimony of candor and lived experience.
Folds of Time Brought to Light: Women and the Spaces They Call Home
At the other end of the spectrum are works that turn to the living spaces of older women, allowing these intimate settings to open onto portraits of women across generations. Within these modest domestic spaces, women are no longer caught in cycles of love and conflict. Instead, they bridge generational divides and support one another, seeking out broader horizons in life.
Tsai Chi-min’s narrative short (M)OTHER portrays a fleeting encounter among three generations of women at a moment when their lives have reached an impasse. Through the healing innocence of a child, its protagonist, living alone in a dilapidated apartment, turns away from death and toward life, emerging from darkness into light. In Fragments of Herstory, veteran documentary filmmaker Hsu Hui-Ju continues the family narrative explored in Hard Good Life and Hard Good Life 2, returning to the childhood home in her memory. Beginning with intimate conversations between Hsu and her grandmother, the film juxtaposes their traumatic memories of losing loved ones. Through a tunnel of time woven from film, DV, and other media, it refracts the tender resilience shared across three generations of women. The hand-drawn animated short Fluid, meanwhile, employs fluid, surrealist strokes to weave together memories of a mother’s illness and childhood regrets, through which it looks back on the lingering traces of intergenerational trauma and seeks the possibility of healing a mother-daughter relationship steeped in resentment.
Moving between documentary and fiction, Lin Wan-Chen’s Through the dust of time turns its gaze toward two women in their eighties who remain in a quiet huofang, a traditional Hakka communal dwelling, in a declining Hakka settlement in Pingtung. Through unhurried compositions of light and shadow and performances by non-professional actors, the film weaves a touching portrait of companionship between older women, leaving behind a quiet yet profound undercurrent of nostalgia. Hong Kong director Chan Wing Man’s short Brace for the Storm places side by side the grief of an elderly employee who has lost family and that of an overseas student working part-time who is unable to return home, evoking a shared sense of displacement across geographical boundaries.
Mirrors Across Borders: Alienated Labor and Landscapes of Displacement
As Southeast Asian women come to be seen as a solution to the demand for domestic labor, their fundamental human rights have also become an issue Taiwanese cinema can no longer overlook. Between the Shores and When the Plane Passes By function as twin mirrors, portraying the hardships faced by migrant-worker mothers from contrasting perspectives: on one side, the sorrow of leaving their children behind to work far from home; on the other, the uncertainty and anxiety of being forced to leave a job and enter a shelter because of an unplanned pregnancy. Understated as the two documentaries may seem, their portrayals of everyday joys and sorrows bring into relief the profound inner strength of these Southeast Asian mothers.
Beyond the lives of women engaged in transnational labor, geopolitical upheaval gives rise to another landscape of displacement. In Words in the Wind, Ng Shu Jun ventures deep into the Thai–Myanmar borderlands, drawing on extensive fieldwork to document the itinerant lives of Yunnanese Chinese and the Kokang community. Centering the film on everyday conversations, the director weaves memories of war into ordinary moments in cafés and beneath the eaves of homes, allowing historical trauma to seep naturally into the language of everyday life. While Words in the Wind looks back on histories of displacement, Solitary Wave shifts its gaze toward a factory on the front lines of contemporary conflict in Myanmar, employing touches of magical realism to distill the choices of survival and collective anxieties that emerge amid war.
The documentary short Enver follows a Chinese dissident living in exile, focusing on a Xinjiang doctor now based in the United Kingdom. For years, his efforts have taken him to international courts and human rights organizations as he bears painful witness to the atrocities of the authoritarian regime, yet his inability to alter the status quo has left him deeply disillusioned. The film thus captures the complex sense of rootlessness that accompanies exile. Lin Yi-Chi’s Awake Before Your Gaze turns to experimental imagery to revisit the lingering legacies of the Cold War. Through two-channel setting and hypnotic self-narration, the film contemplates the unsettled identities of children left behind by American servicemen in Taiwan, transforming the intersecting tensions of ethnicity, skin color, memory, and identity into spectral, poetic images.
The animated shorts Force Times Displacement and Till the Stars Rise take a different path, using philosophical allegory to explore questions of “labor” and “movement.” Resembling an intricate collage, Force Times Displacement draws on the physical formula “work = force × displacement” to depict the alienation of labor and materialism in industrial society, sketching a sweeping panorama of human society within its remarkably concise runtime. The puppet stop-motion animation Till the Stars Rise, meanwhile, begins with a premise tinged with science fiction, in which people can remain awake for only three hours each day. Through the experience of a wandering traveler lodging with an unfamiliar family, the film reconsiders everyday labor, familial bonds, and the meaning of being human. With their rich imaginations, both animations take “labor” and “movement” beyond concrete necessities of survival and into deeper existential inquiry.
From the wounds of one’s family of origin and memories of displacement across national borders to allegories of survival shaped by alienated labor, the works by women filmmakers in this year’s Taiwan Competition not only unfold the subtle creases of women’s lives, but also inscribe personal experience into the fabric of historical, political, and social structures. The figures they portray are not merely those constrained by their times, but those who, amid oppression and disorder, continue to seek a place from which to assert their subjectivity and define their own destinies. As women filmmakers transform private wounds into public discourse, their works once again demonstrate that “the personal is political” is not an endpoint, but a way of seeing that opens onto a more complex world.
