10 Films you shouldn’t miss at the 28th Women Make Waves Film Festival

By Asian Film Festival on October 5, 2021 • ( Leave a comment )

These are ten films you shouldn’t miss at the 28th Women Make Waves Film Festival which will take place from October 15th – 24th, 2021 at the Spot Huashan cinema (No. 1, Section 1, Bade Rd, Zhongzheng District, Taipei)

– Recommended Films –

**Ahead of the Curve** by Jen Rainin, Rivkah Beth Medow – USA | 2020 – 97 minutes

In 1990, with a fist full of credit cards, a lucky run at the horse track and chutzpah for days, Franco STEVENS launched《CURVE》, the best-selling lesbian lifestyle magazine ever published. Ahead of The Curve traces the power of lesbian visibility and community from the early ‘90s to present day through the story of Franco’s founding of Curve magazine. Decades later, as her legacy faces extinction and she reassesses her life after a disabling injury, she sets out to understand visibility work being led by an intersection of queer women today (WMW 2021).

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**A Leave** by Lee Ran-hee – South Korea | 2020 – 81 minutes

A 49-year-old fired worker Jae-bok has been holding a sit-in for 5 years with his colleagues. After the union lost the final lawsuit asking for the invalidation of recent layoffs including theirs, they decide to take 10 leave from the sit-in. Jae-bok goes home and gets a part-time job at a furniture factory during the leave to earn money to pay for his daughter’s college tuition deposit and another daughter’s down jacket. As his satisfaction with working again anddaily life with his daughters grows, Jae-bok receives an offer for a full-time job… (WMW 2021).

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**A letter to A’ma** by Chen Hui-Ling – Taiwan | 2021 – 105 minutes

Through a student art project guided by teacher CHEN, the collective memory of an island begins to emerge. After experiencing 400 years of colonization and 50 years of dictatorship, Taiwan is now becoming the front of a potential war between world powers. How will Taiwan rebuild its identity in the postcolonial era? (WMW 2021)

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**Fear(less) and Dear** by Anson Hoi Shan Mak – Hong Kong | 2020 – 106 minutes

Hong Kong has been going through one of the toughest periods of its history due to a society turbulent and the COVID-19 pandemic that has swept the globe. Director and visual artist Anson MAK invites three local artists, who are also parents— performing artist and district councillor Clara CHEUNG, political comic artist Justin WONG and writer CHEUNG Yuen-Man—to genuinely share their stories regarding the notion of fear. How do young parents feel? What do they think about fear, their kids and the future? Their artworks also powerfully respond to political unrest and personal innermost emotions, as this film in itself (WMW 2021).

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**Girl’s School** by Mi Mi Lee – Taiwan | 1982 – 91 minutes

Chih-Ting and Chia-Lin, two students in Pingtung Girls’ Senior High School, are bosom friends. Their close friendship attracts jealousy from other classmates; thus rumors about them being lesbians spread. When this groundless rumor victimizes Chih-Ting and costs her best friend, it becomes too much to bear. In the 70s, the Taiwanese mainstream society regarded homosexuality as a negative variation of sexuality and imputed the cause of homosexuality to growing up in an unhealthy environment. However, the two protagonists’ friendship remains the heart of the story. Their unspoken emotional undercurrents are left for the audience to infer (WMW 2021).

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**High Life** by Claire Denis – France, Germany, Poland, UK, US | 2018 – 113 minutes

Deep space. Monte and his daughter Willow live together aboard a spacecraft, in complete isolation. A man whose strict self-discipline is a shield against desire, Monte fathered her against his will. His sperm was used to inseminate the young woman who gave birth to her. They were members of a crew of prisoners – death row inmates. Guinea pigs sent on a mission. Now only Monte and Willow remain. Through his daughter, he experiences the birth of an all-powerful love. Together, the father and the daughter approach their destination – the black hole in which time and space cease to exist (WMW 2021).

Screening Dates:
October 22nd, 2021 | Friday | Spot Huashan A One | 17:10 pm

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**Mother-Child** by Andrea Testa – Argentina | 2019 – 66 minutes

In the consulting rooms of a public hospital in Argentina, social workers dialogue with pregnant young girls, woman who has just given birth or ones that are hospitalized due to unsafe abortions. Coming from the environment of extreme poverty and vulnerability, many of them are victims of gender violence. Hence their pregnancies discourage them even more to imagine a hopeful present or future. The film reflects the desires, tensions and fears around forced maternity and clandestine abortion (WMW 2021).

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**Night Shot** by Carolina Moscoso – Chile | 2019 – 80 minutes

Recording the everyday was always a way of relating to the world. One night the rape happened and everything changed, although the search continued. When revisiting these images, a dialogue arises between light and darkness, while the strangeness remains before the world. Eight years after having been victim of sexual violence, the filmmaker reflects on the wounds caused by the abuse, alternating the account of the consequences derived from a patriarchal judiciary system and fragments of diaries filmed by herself. Night Shot is an important gesture of poetic resistance that dares to go where justice can’t (WMW 2021).

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**Writing with Fire** by Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh – India | 2021 – 94 minutes

In a cluttered news landscape dominated by men, emerges India’s only newspaper run by Dalit women. Armed with smartphones, Chief Reporter Meera and her journalists break traditions and redefine what it means to be powerful. It is the first time modern Dalit women will be seen on screen, not as victims of their circumstances but as writers of their own destiny. As India now stands at the crossroads between secular ethos and radicalisation, the choices they make will define their future as a nation (WMW 2021).

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**You and I** by Fanny Chotimah – Indonesia | 2020 – 75 minutes

70-year-old Kaminah and 74-year-old Kusdalini met as Indonesian political detainees in 1965 when both were on the cusp of adulthood. After being rejected by her hometown, Kaminah went to live with Kusdalini. Since then, they have been inseparable, living together in Surakarta, Central Java for over 50 years. Now, in their 70s, they survive on the kindness of their neighbors, and the crackers that they sell. Growing old hand in hand, You and I charts a delicate moment in time when the pair are faced with the heartbreaking realities of growing old (WMW 2021).

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