Small Talk

Director: Huang Hui-chen

2016 / 88min / DCP

The first documentary to be selected as Taiwan’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature, Small Talk centers on an ongoing dialogue of reckoning and attempted reconciliation between Huang and her mother, A-nu, a practicing Taoist priestess with whom the filmmaker has lived in close quarters with for years, along with Huang’s own young daughter, but always while being held at a vast emotional distance. Extracting details concerning her life from the reticent A-nu—a lesbian who took flight from an abusive arranged marriage—as well as her mother’s siblings and ex-lovers, Huang unpacks rankling secrets, her film in due course evolving into a portrait of three generations of women shaped by the rigidly patriarchal society into which they were born.