This screening will be followed by a Zoom Q&A with director Huang Hui-chen.
Excutive produced by Hou Hsiao-hsien and featuring music from composer Gong Lim (Millennium Mambo), Small Talk is one of Taiwan’s most widely-acclaimed documentaries, and the first such film to be selected as Taiwan’s submission to the Academy Awards. The film is an intimate portrait of the director herself, and her mother, A-nu, a Taoist priestess in rural Taiwan.
Through a series of long-shots, Huang Hui-chen interviews A-nu about her troubled past - as a lesbian pressured into an arranged marriage at an early age with an abusive husband - and their uncomfortable estrangement that persists even after decades living under the same roof. Further conversations with A-nu’s siblings and ex-lovers produce a frank and complex portrait that reflects the prejudices and mores of a society at large, while remaining both universally significant and courageously intimate.
