Two short films by Wang Yi-ling

This post looks at two promising shorts by director Wang Yi-ling who graduated from the Film Department of National Taiwan University of Arts. She has, to date, directed a number of shorts several of which have been nominated for and won awards. Her first feature Fish Pond has recently premiered at the Kaohsiung Film Festival.…

Berlin NewGen Chinese Film Festival

The Berlin NewGen Chinese Film Festival which ran in person in November 2022 with a selection of 19 Chinese short films and 6 feature titles has now made over half the shorts available online till the end of December (on CathayPlay)., As I have suggested here before, short films often provide a different perspective on…

Two films about visual artsts: Distant [远处] (2022) and As Autumn Draws Near [四季如秋] (2022)

Two contrasting art/indie films about visual artists: a filmmaker and a photographer respectively. Distant is yet another film about filmmakers making films and about as successful as most of the genre, i.e. not very. In Distant (available on CathayPlay), the usual morose film director Zhang Hao (Zhang He] is making a film about a director…

CathayPlay Special Screening

The Chinese independent movie streaming site CathayPlay has recently (from 1 December 2022) screened a number of short films under the (unexplained) rubric Special Screening. In this case, several of the films are quite special and well worth catching. In Thus They Spoke (2022), documentary filmmaker Manni [Manni Wu] is visiting her former lover in…

Shards of Her [她和她的她] (2022)

A female-centred drama which explores the impact of sexual abuse but, despite the importance of the themes, Shards of Her is ultimately let down by flat presentation. Available on Netflix. As the (9 part) series open, we meet Lin Ch'en-hsi [Hsu Wei-ning aka Tiffany Hsu] who is a successful recruitment executive, Despite her success and…