As its title suggests, Small Talk (日常對話) is driven by conversation, specifically director Huang Hui-chen’s (黃惠偵) efforts to get her lesbian mother, A-nu (阿女), to open up about her past. She also speaks with other relatives and A-nu’s former lovers, asking very direct questions that clearly make some of them uncomfortable.
But what makes the film compelling is the lack of small talk. Huang reveals that even though they live under the same roof, she and her mother barely interact. A-nu cooks lunch and leaves for the day to hang out with her friends, and in one scene doesn’t even acknowledge Huang when she returns home.
With a painful past involving an arranged marriage with an abusive man, A-nu prefers to keep everything to herself. Huang admits in the film that she wouldn’t know how to approach the subject if she hadn’t picked up the camera, and through her lens she attempts to understand A-nu and release them both from the shackles of the past.
Photo courtesy of Mirror Stage Films
When they do start talking, the back-and-forth is terse, often ending up with long shots of silent weeping. There’s a suffocating tension whenever Huang appears onscreen, a stark contrast to A-nu’s carefree demeanor when she is on her own.
As such, even though the focus is A-nu, it is Huang who drives the film as the audience follows her personal journey to understand and connect with her mother. We are introduced to the story through Huang’s childhood, and we wait with her, somewhat impatiently, wondering if A-nu will reveal anything.
Huang is so much of the film. During one interview between daughter and mother, A-nu abruptly stops talking and leaves the room. The camera zooms out to reveal Huang dabbing her eyes with a tissue. With A-nu’s continued resistance to open up or talk at length, Huang’s involvement is essential for the film to be coherent.
Photo: Pan Shao-tang, Taipei Times
The documentary also gives the viewer a sense of what it was like to be a lesbian in rural Taiwan decades ago. Although homosexuality was not openly discussed, it is intimated that society was more open at the time, as A-nu brought female lovers home (who helped to care for Huang and her sister). A-nu states that she was more ashamed that her ex-husband beat her.
“There’s a lot of people like me,” she says. Instead, it is Huang who says that society made her feel for a long time that she should be ashamed of A-nu.
Small Talk is essentially the full-length cut of Huang’s short film, The Priestess Walks Alone (我和我的T媽媽), which won several local awards. Small Talk fared even better overseas, winning best documentary at the Teddy Awards, which are presented to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) productions at the Berlin International Film Festival. It was also nominated for best documentary and best editing at the Golden Horse Awards.
Photo courtesy of Mirror Stage Films
It’s unclear how long Huang had been planning this film, as there is plenty of old grainy footage. One would think that if A-nu had been unwilling to talk for that many years, she would be even more reluctant with a camera pointed at her. At one point, A-nu gets angry that Huang didn’t ask her permission before filming. But then we also have plenty of scenes from her daily life, including an intimate scene where she receives a massage from a girlfriend, that she must have agreed to be followed around.
Media interviews with Huang reveal that she started filming her mother in 1998. But it was only after Huang gave birth to her daughter in 2012 that she started pondering what it meant to be a mother, prompting her to finally breach the longstanding silence.
That’s when Huang became part of the story, though what we know about her is strictly in relation to her mother. There are enough pieces of Huang’s life mentioned that one may be left with a slew of questions after leaving the theater. She reveals a few personal secrets, but we don’t see anything from her daily life, other than taking care of her daughter. Why does she continue to live with A-nu after she got married and had a child? How did she go from not finishing elementary school and working since the age of 6 to making documentaries?
On second thought, we should applaud Huang’s courage in already revealing so much. It’s difficult enough to display something so deeply personal, and not everything needs to be laid bare.
As mega K-pop group BTS returns to the stage after a hiatus of more than three years, one major market is conspicuously missing from its 12-month world tour: China. The omission of one of the group’s biggest fan bases comes as no surprise. In fact, just the opposite would have been huge news. China has blocked most South Korean entertainment since 2016 under an unofficial ban that also restricts movies and the country’s popular TV dramas. For some Chinese, that means flying to Seoul to see their favorite groups perform — as many were expected to do for three shows opening
Taiwan’s semiconductor industry consumes electricity at rates that would strain most national grids. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) alone accounted for more than 9 percent, or 2,590 megawatts (MW), of the nation’s power demand last year. The factories that produce chips for the world’s phones and servers run around the clock. They cannot tolerate blackouts. Yet Taiwan imports 97 percent of its energy, with liquefied natural gas reserves measured in days. Underground, Taiwan has options. Studies from National Taiwan University estimate recoverable geothermal resources at more than 33,000 MW. Current installed capacity stands below 10 MW. OBSTACLES Despite Taiwan’s significant geothermal potential, the
The entire Li Zhenxiu (李貞秀) saga has been an ugly, complicated mess. Born in China’s Hunan Province, she moved to work in Shenzhen, where she met her future Taiwanese husband. Most accounts have her arriving in Taiwan and marrying somewhere between 1993 and 1999. She built a successful career in Taiwan in the tech industry before founding her own company. She also served in high-ranking positions on various environmentally-focused tech associations. She says she was inspired by the founding of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in 2019 by Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), and began volunteering for the party soon after. Ko
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) returned from her trip to meet People’s Republic of China (PRC) dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) bearing “a gift” for the people of Taiwan: 10 measures the PRC proposed to “facilitate the peaceful development of cross-strait relations.” “China on Sunday unveiled 10 new incentive measures for Taiwan,” wrote Reuters, wrongly. The PRC’s longstanding habit with Taiwan relations is to repackage already extant or once-existing policies and declare that they are “new.” The list forwarded by Cheng reflects that practice. NEW MEASURES? Note the first item: establishing regular communication mechanisms between the Chinese Communist Party
RSS