Broadening the Spectrum of Chinese-Language Cinema, and the Ubiquitous Anxiety over Money
An Observation on the FIPRESCI Prize Lineup in the 62nd Golden Horse Awards
The Chinese-language films nominated for the Golden Horse Awards have been largely dominated by filmmakers from Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, while the Chinese ethnic communities in Singapore and Malaysia have increasingly made their presence felt since the turn of the century. That’s the general perception of the Golden Horse for the past decades. However, the lineup for the 62nd Golden Horse Awards revealed an even richer landscape, showcasing not only these established communities but also a vibrant Chinese filmmaking community in North America. Meanwhile, many emerging filmmakers shortlisted for this year’s FIPRESCI Prize in the Golden Horse addressed the anxieties surrounding money and class mobility prevalent among different generations within Chinese communities in the Northern Hemisphere.
To understand the evolution of the Chinese cinema landscape at the Golden Horse Awards, one must trace its history and transformations. Founded in 1962 by the Republic of China government in Taiwan, the Awards initially focused on Mandarin films from Taiwan and Hong Kong and were highly valued in the industry throughout the 1970s and 80s.
The major shift occurred in the 1990s when the Awards were privatized and managed by the non-governmental body, Taipei Golden Horse International Film Festival Executive Committee. The committee actively depoliticized the event, reformed the judging system for greater fairness and transparency, and progressively welcomed filmmakers from Mainland China and overseas. These reforms significantly elevated the Awards’ prestige, making it the highest cinematic honor in the Chinese-speaking world.
However, the Golden Horse remains vulnerable to cross-strait political rivalry. After a political dispute at the 55th Awards in 2018, the Chinese government initiated a boycott in 2019, leading to the absence of Mainland Chinese films and the participation of only independent Hong Kong titles.
Mainland works began to reappear from 2021, primarily independent documentaries and features like Stone Gate (2023) and Wang Bing’s Youth documentary series. Significantly, these participating films—such as An Unfinished Film (2024) and Some Rain Must Fall (2024)—either bypass the Mainland censorship entirely or use foreign co-production status to circumvent government restrictions. Conversely, filmmakers with strong career ties or investments in the Chinese industry often choose to avoid the Golden Horse Awards, even with international acclaim, to prevent political backlash.
Chance to Open to a Broader Chinese Cinematic Landscape
It is this collective absence of the big titles and big names (including commercial cinema and most of China’s Fifth and Sixth Generation auteurs) from the Mainland and Hong Kong for many years that has provided the Golden Horse an excellent opportunity to broaden its perspective to Chinese cinema in South East Asian beyond Asia. Therefore, among the 12 debut features in the lineup of the FIPRESCI Prize this year, a more diverse composition of the Chinese cinema landscape is presented.
Two independent films from China, Poor Taxi and 1 Girl Infinite, embody contrasting creative expressions: trained in a Chinese film academy, Zhuo Kailuo’s (卓楷羅) Poor Taxi delivers a black comedy with a masculine lens, crafted by a local creative team in Northeast China under producer Geng Jun (Free and Easy). In contrast, Lily Hu’s debut 1 Girl Infinite, a lesbian narrative, emerges from a feminine perspective, influenced by North American indie cinema and featuring an internationally collaborative creative team.
From Hong Kong, Road to Vendetta stands out with its collaborative efforts with Japanese teams, wrapping an assassin’s tale in action-packed storytelling, offering fast-paced and dazzling cinematic entertainment. Singaporean emerging talent Tan Si-you’s Amoeba challenges societal norms, critiquing mainstream ideology with a rebellious voice while expressing an independent spirit.
Given the Golden Horse Awards criteria requiring over half of a crew to be of Chinese descent, the inclusion of three North American Chinese-language films in a single year stands out as the most impressive industry phenomenon on this lineup. These films—Lucky Lu (U.S. East Coast), Rosemae (U.S. West Coast), and Finch & Midland (Canada)—reflect both the evolving experiences of the Chinese diaspora and the burgeoning growth of Chinese and Asian communities within the North American film industry.
On the other hand, comprising nearly half of the FIPRESCI lineup, the five Taiwanese titles were intended by the Festival to showcase the scope and profile of the current local film landscape. Among them, veteran advertising and music video director Shawn Yu’s (游紹翔) Unexpected Courage, a story adapted from his partner’s high-risk pregnancy experience, demonstrates a strong ambition to move the audience with mature commercial filmmaking techniques. Editor-turned-writer-director Pan Ke-yin’s (潘客印) Family Matters is a heartfelt family drama composed of four vignettes. He applies down-to-earth cinematic language to depict the inexpressible bonds between family members. The unspoken familial chemistry among the characters is the key element that drives the plot and the audience’s sentiment.
Unexpected Courage and Family Matters engage audiences through the sentimental, popular style typical of local commercial films. Meanwhile, two female writer-directors employed independent filmmaking to maximize their auteur vision within popular narratives in their decade-awaited debuts. Lee Yi-shan (李宜珊), whose short Sisters’ Busy Hands (2020) was selected for the Clermont-Ferrand, blends coming-of-age, sports film, and melodrama in A Dance With Rainbows. It focuses on a young girl’s dilemma between resisting and conforming to the complex and sometimes contradictory moral values of the adult world. U.S.-based Tsou Shih-ching’s iPhone-shot Left Handed Girl sees her collaborating with Sean Baker (as co-producer, co-writer, and editor). U.S.-based creator Tsou Shih-ching’s iPhone-shot Left Handed Girl was notably co-produced, co-written, and edited by her creative partner Sean Baker. The film uses the popular family drama genre and an optimistic, fairy-tale-like perspective to follow a destitute mother and her two daughters as they attempt to stabilize their livelihoods by starting over at a night market.
Shen Ko-shang (沈可尚), who won the Grand Prix at the Taipei Film Awards for his documentary A Rolling Stone (2012) and was known for his ambitious visual aesthetics, made his feature debut, Deep Quiet Room. It is the film that is dedicated the most to visual form with an auteurist consciousness among the lineup. In depicting the protagonist’s obsessive pursuit of truth regarding a family tragedy, Shen’s signature calm and intense gaze on human nature and psychological states—previously seen in his documentaries—continues in his fiction debut.
Exploring the Pervasive Financial and Class Anxiety
While the FIPRESCI lineup broadened the geographic spectrum of the global Chinese film industry, five titles specifically reflect the anxiety over wealth and class mobility among Chinese communities in different regions.
Across Asia, Chinese communities experienced rapid industrialization and modernization throughout the 20th century, rapidly transitioning from impoverished agrarian societies. This profound environmental shift has resulted in a lingering anxiety about financial precarity, rooted in the agrarian past. Furthermore, traditional Chinese values emphasizing ascending to the gentry/professional class remain key to escaping poverty. These factors continue to drive the next generation of Chinese individuals to pursue international migration and seek capital accumulation in the 21st century. Yet, amid today’s increasing wealth disparity, the potential for greater class mobility has emerged as a significant global challenge. Collectively, these deeply rooted cultural factors provide a compelling entry point for Chinese filmmakers to foster empathy and connection among audiences who share the same cultural heritage, both domestically and internationally.
North America: The Quest of Class Mobility in Finch & Midland and Lucky Lu
Timothy Young, a Canadian-born Hong Kong immigrant, illuminates the cross-generational struggles of the Hong Kong community in Canada in Finch & Midland. He tells the stories of four middle-aged characters—a single mom takes on all kinds of jobs to earn money, actively seeking avenues to ascend to the middle class; a man sacrifices family ties to secure his middle-class socio-economic status, only to lose everything due to layoffs; a second-generation immigrant sacrifices her own future to satisfy the traditional Chinese family moral value; and a one-hit singer treats the foreign land as a sanctuary to flee his failure. Through a millennial perspective, this film explores the pursuit of class mobility by the Hong Kong immigrants of the Baby Boomer generation, who moved overseas around the time of the 1997 handover. At a time when Hong Kong’s middle class has been moving overseas in recent years to seek better lives due to the Chinese government’s tightening grip on the region, the completion of Finch & Midland seems to be a glimpse of the future lives of this current wave of Hong Kong immigrants.
Korean-Canadian Lloyd Lee Choi’s Lucky Lu also focuses on the struggles of an underdog. Adapted from his 2022 Cannes short film Same Old, the protagonist Lu (Chan Chen, The Grandmaster, Dune), a failed businessman forced to become a delivery rider, is facing urgent financial challenges. After being cheated out of money by a friend and having his e-bike stolen, Lu must find a way to raise over a thousand dollars in a single day to secure his shabby apartment to accommodate his wife and daughter, who are on their way from a middle-class life in their hometown to join his life in New York.
In the New York Chinese community depicted in Lucky Lu, many individuals arrive with hopes of a better life. However, when these aspirations falter, they confront a harsh reality where the vulnerable often prey on one another due to desperate needs for cash. The film portrays scenes reflective of a broader trend seen in various cities, such as how an immigrant rents a fake account from a local to work as a bicycle food delivery person. This phenomenon echoes the 2024 French film Souleymane’s Story, reflecting a widespread cross-Atlantic social issue as the sharing economy expands.
China and Taiwan: Lives of the Struggling Underdogs in Poor Taxi, A Dance With Rainbows, and Left Handed Girl
The portrayal of human nature among those living below the poverty line is evident in Zhuo Kailuo’s Chinese black comedy, Poor Taxi. The honest protagonist, who lacks any special skills, resorts to driving a tricycle—which is only permitted for disabled individuals—to solicit fares on the streets. To get by, he pretends to be crippled. However, he soon encounters a con artist who makes money by staging fake car accidents. When faced with the con artist’s unreasonable demands for compensation, the penniless protagonist finds himself forced to support the scammer.
Zhuo Kailuo builds on the absurdly comedic style of the film’s producer, Geng Jun, echoing the works of Aki Kaurismäki. The film satirizes a troubling phenomenon within grassroots Chinese society, where marginalized individuals, deprived of job opportunities and hope for upward mobility, exploit and deceive one another in their struggle for meager profits.
The financial anxiety is evident in the shortlisted Taiwanese films as well. A Dance With Rainbows follows a teenage girl involved in underground boxing as she tries to save her disintegrating family. The narrative suggests that the family’s difficult financial situation and the differing values of the parents are likely the main causes of their breakdown. The girl’s mother struggles to support the family and their debts by running a lunchbox shop on her own, while the father, in pursuit of quick wealth, becomes involved in an affair with a wealthy and attractive antique trader, moving into her luxurious house.
The red Ferrari owned by the antique dealer symbolizes class disparity, constantly reminding the protagonist of this distinction. This stark difference motivates her to participate in underground boxing to earn money. She believes that by contributing to the family’s finances, she can help her parents’ marriage find a viable solution. However, she finds herself stepping into the morally and financially ambiguous world of adulthood, caught in a challenging predicament.
In Left Handed Girl, the mother and her daughters also face a significant financial burden. The mother has lost all her savings due to her ex-husband’s debts and is forced to start over by setting up a stall at a night market. While the eldest teenage daughter complains that her mother isn’t making money quickly enough, she herself is grappling with the serious issue of an unexpected pregnancy. For the family, dealing with the never-ending bills and expenses means that social mobility feels like a distant goal, while the risk of social reproduction is a pressing reality. The compassion shown by the director Tsou Shih-ching and her partner Sean Baker is not offering an unrealistic tale-like success story, but allows for a portrayal of the mother and daughters supporting each other amidst their challenging and often embarrassing circumstances.
A Greater Landscape to be Explored
Finch & Midland and Lucky Lu from North America illustrate a quest for class mobility, be it successful or not. In contrast, A Dance With Rainbows offers a glimpse into this value system as it exists in Taiwan. Meanwhile, the sharp irony in Poor Taxi highlights the destined hopelessness faced by those at the bottom of Chinese society. On the other hand, Left Handed Girl, which also focuses on Taiwan, seeks to provide an optimistic perspective, highlighting the unique and varied ways that filmmakers in Taiwan and China address people’s struggles.
The 62nd Golden Horse Awards successfully broadened the scope of Chinese-language cinema within the global film industry, offering a more diverse perspective on Chinese ethnic communities. The Golden Horse will continue to expand this range, allowing its audience to experience a wider variety of Chinese stories and experiences through film.
Hung Jian-lue
©FIPRESCI 2025