The 19th annual Vancouver Taiwanese Film Festival will present five feature films, including a well-received character study starring Sylvia Chang. In the emotionally charged Daughter’s Daughter, the Taiwanese screen legend plays Jin Aixia, a retired woman who becomes legal guardian of her deceased daughter frozen embryo. Jin faces a dilemma over whether to pursue surrogacy. The film co-stars Vancouver-born Karena Ka-Yan Lam (July Rhapsody) as Jin’s other daughter, Emma.
Chang and Taiwanese New Wave master Hou Hsiao-hsien served as executive producers of the film, which had its world premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. For her performance, Chang was nominated for Golden Horse, Taipei Film Festival, and Asian Film Awards for Best Actress. She also won a Platform Award – Honourable Mention at TIFF.
Meanwhile, Daughter’s Daughter director and screenwriter, Xi Huang, was a TIFF Platform Award nominee and won a Golden Horse Award for Best Original Screenplay.
The Vancouver Taiwanese Film Festival will present Daughter’s Daughter at noon on Saturday (September 6) in the VIFF Cinema (1181 Seymour Street). Earlier that morning at 10 a.m., the festival will screen an award-winning Taiwanese-French co-production, Salli, in the VIFF cinema.
Salli stars Esther Liu as a lonely 38-year-old chicken farmer pursing an online romance with a suave Frenchman. Liu’s character, Hui-jun Lin, travels from Taiwan to Paris as she ignores warnings about being conned. Liu earned a Taipei Film Award nomination for Best Actress.
Yung-Hsu Tang plays Hui-jun’s niece. Tang received nominations for a Golden Horse Award as Best New Performer and Best Supporting Actress at the Taipei Film Festival. The film’s director, Chien-Hung Lien, won the ABC Award and Most Promising Talent Award at the Osaka Asian Film Festival.
Festival presents John Hsu horror-comedy
On Saturday, the Vancouver Taiwanese Film Festival will present three other features in the Lochmaddy Studio Theatre at the VIFF Centre. John Hsu directed Dead Talents Society, which will screen at 9:45 a.m. It’s a bloody, supernatural comedy that had its North American premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.
“In the spirit of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, but set in a community of East Asian frighteners, Dead Talents Society invites you to peer beyond the veil into the secret netherworld of professional spectres as they compete in terrorizing the living to ensure their liminal lifestyle,” the TIFF website stated.
“You see, souls have a finite shelf life after death, and must regularly spook up the mortal realm as a curse or urban legend in order to secure a ‘haunter’s license,’ a renewable reprieve from total oblivion,” it added. “While such macabre machinations are no sweat for those who lived boldly in life, for the meeker variety of newly dead, it promises a second death sentence.”
Starring Chen Bolin and Sandrine Pinna, Dead Talents Society has won a dozen prizes. They include a Taipei Film Award for Best Director for Hsu, as well as audience awards at festivals in Spain, France, the United States, and Canada.
Doubles Match and Didi focus on youth struggles
Following Dead Talents Society, the festival will present a youth sports drama, Doubles Match, in the Lochmaddy Studio Theatre at 11:53 a.m. Po-hao Hung directed this film about two friends who dream of making the national table-tennis team, but they become rivals after their coach leaves. Doubles Match received five nominations at the International Film Festival for Children and Young Audience (Schlingel) in Germany. And Ming-Shuai Shih was nominated for a Taipei Film Award for Best Supporting Actor.
The most-honoured film at this year’s festival, Didi, is in the Lochmaddy Studio Theatre at 1:50 p.m. on Saturday. Sean Wang’s semi-autobiographical Didi racked up 21 awards and 38 nominations for a story about a 13-year-old Taiwanese American, Chris Wang (Izaac Weng), who lives in California. His childhood nickname is Didi, and Guardian reviewer Adrian Horton called it “easily one of the best, most seamless films I’ve seen on the experience of growing up online”.
“He’s adrift in his family – his mostly absent father is away on business in Taiwan; his strained mother (Joan Chen) stuck in a thankless role as stay-at-home mom and caretaker to her judgmental mother-in-law (Chang Li Hua),” Horton wrote in her review. “His sharp-tongued sister, Vivian (Shirley Chen), weeks away from her freshman year of college at UCSD, is four years apart but a world away in his understanding.”
Short films galore
The Vancouver Taiwanese Film Festival will begin at the VIFF Centre on Friday (September 5) with an invitation-only opening ceremony. Doors open to the public at 7:15 for a 7:30 p.m. panel discussion, which the festival is calling Echoes of Culture, Reflections of AI—Authenticity and Identity on Screen.
In addition, the festival will offer short films, with most only appearing at a different venue.
Following Daughter’s Daughter, two shorts will be at the VIFF Cinema: Lin Shu Chiao’s “Mr. Eternal Jellyfish” and Kai Ching Hunag’s “The True Spirit”.
These two are also part of a program of 16 shorts that will be screened at T.E.N. Creative Hub (1045 Howe Street) all day Saturday, starting at 8:30 a.m. These screenings will be followed by a Q&A session at the same location from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. and an after-party that continues until 10 p.m.
The Vancouver Taiwanese Film Festival will take place at the VIFF Centre and T.E.N. Creative Hub on September 5 and 6. For tickets and more information, visit the website. Follow Pancouver on X (formerly Twitter) @PancouverMedia and on Instagram @PancouverMedia.
