Like Mother, Like Daughter

Complementing our run of Huang Xi’s Daughter’s Daughter, Like Mother, Like Daughter brings together films that constitute a distinctly Taiwanese tradition of female authorship and the representation of women’s subjectivity, among them Lee Mi-mi’s Taiwanese Urban Female trilogy, which explores the lives of marginalized Taiwanese women in urban society across various generations—Unmarried Mothers (1980); Evening News (1981), focusing on divorced women in their thirties; and the drama of a teenage friendship buckling under the pressure of rumor-mongering, Girls’ School (1982)—as well as Edward Yang’s opening salvo of the Taiwanese New Wave, That Day, on the Beach; and Huang Hui-chen’s Small Talk, produced by Hou Hsiao-hsien, in which the director delves into her rocky history with her mother, a lesbian Taoist priestess. A program designed to shed a light on a lesser-known facet of Taiwanese cinema, from its early ’80s renaissance to today.

Sponsored by the Taipei Cultural Center of TECO in New York