Girl
Drama • 2025 • 2h 5m
Nühai
This movie was screened on 82. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 2025
In 1988 Taiwan, Hsiao-lee grows up in an oppressive family: an emotionally absent mother and a violent father who embodies patriarchal culture. Her encounter with Li-li, a free-spirited and irreverent peer, opens a space for autonomy and self-discovery.
“Our lives are determined not so much by our childhood as by the way we have learned to imagine it.”
— James Hillman
Shu Qi’s Girl treats childhood as a terrain of both constraint and possibility. Hsiao-lee is defined by familial pressure: her mother, absorbed in duty, shows no affection, especially toward her eldest daughter; her father embodies the silent violence of patriarchal culture, marking every gesture with oppression and fear. Daily life flows through silences and repetitive movements, an existence compressed into narrow emotional spaces.
Li-li introduces a breach of otherness: curiosity, complicity, freedom. Their friendship is not comfort, but resistance: escapes into courtyards, stolen laughter, small secrets that give weight to Hsiao-lee’s existence. Shu Qi delineates these moments with measured direction, transforming apparent banality into acts of autonomy.
The film highlights the tension between the desire for liberation and familial constraints. Every confrontation with the father, every domestic obligation, testifies to repression; Li-li represents the possibility of emotional and intellectual autonomy. The cinematography amplifies the contrast between light and shadow, silence and speech, creating a suspended space.
Girl does not simply depict friendship. It is an analysis of self-construction, of the necessity to find an inner core amidst constraint and lack of recognition. Childhood can be both prison and laboratory, and every relationship, every suspended gesture, measures the possibility of building—or failing to build—an identity.
“Childhood is a disease—a malady from which one recovers by growing up.”
— William Golding
This movie was in the official competition of 82nd Venice International Film Festival 2025
