Left-Handed Girl (左撇子女孩), a film by Taiwanese director Tsou Shih-ching (鄒時擎) and cowritten by Oscar-winning director Sean Baker, won the Gan Foundation Award for Distribution at the Cannes Critics’ Week on Wednesday.
The award, which includes a 20,000 euro (US$22,656) prize, is intended to support the French release of a first or second feature film by a new director.
According to Critics’ Week, the prize would go to the film’s French distributor, Le Pacte.
Photo courtesy of Left-Handed Girl productions
"A melodrama full of twists and turns, Left-Handed Girl retraces the daily life of a single mother and her two daughters in Taipei, combining the irresistible charm of independent productions and the energy of blockbusters," Critics’ Week’s Web site said.
In her acceptance speech, Tsou said the film drew on her many memories from Taiwan, including tense relationships in a traditional family and quiet everyday acts of resistance that often went unnoticed.
In an interview, Tsou said that Left-handed Girl allowed her to "rediscover Taiwan’s beauty."
She said that she first came up with the idea more than 20 years ago and began location scouting with Baker at the time.
However, the scale of the production, requiring a large cast and multiple filming locations, made it difficult to secure funding for a foreign-language film, so the project was shelved.
It was not until 2010, after Baker finished his third feature, Prince of Broadway, that the pair returned to Taiwan to scout locations and resume work on the script.
Tsou said that during that trip, a chance encounter with a five-year-old girl at Taipei’s Tonghua (Linjiang) Night Market became a source of inspiration that helped shape the film.
Asked whether living in the US had made her feel disconnected from Taiwan, Tsou said it had not.
In fact, growing older has made her more attentive to the lives of women in Taiwan, and her portrayal of the country has grown more nuanced as a result, she said.
Tsou has served as a cowriter on several of Baker’s films, including the critically acclaimed Tangerine and The Florida Project.
Left-Handed Girl, starring Janel Tsai (蔡 淑臻), Nina Ye (葉子綺) and Huang Teng-hui (黃鐙輝), debuted globally at Critics’ Week on Thursday last week.
She added that she knows Taiwan well, as she spends every Lunar New Year holiday with her family in Taiwan.
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