16th New York Asian Film Festival

Jun 30 - Jul 16, 2017

FilmsGuestsSchedule & Tickets

Photo: © 2017 Wild Dog Productions

North American Premiere

The Gangster's Daughter

林北小舞

Noir and gangster film tropes are blended into a bittersweet yet gritty coming of age drama that is at once thrilling, dark and moving. Shaowu, a seemingly typical teenage girl who lives on Taiwan’s remote Kinmen Island, is briefly reunited with Keiko (Jack Kao), her estranged gangster father, at her mother’s funeral. Soon after, the defiant Shaowu gets in trouble with a school bully and is sent to the big city of Taipei to live with her father. Shaowu’s adolescent trials and tribulations in her new urban surroundings are paralleled with her father’s own personal conflict: trying to go straight for his daughter’s sake. However, when old school codes of honor are compromised by his cohorts’ corruption, Keiko has no choice but to take things into his own hands and settle accounts once and for all.

Director: Chen Mei-juin
Cast: Lawrence Ko, Jack Kao, Ally Chiu
Languages: Mandarin, Taiwanese with English subtitles
2017; 104 min.; DCP

SCHEDULE:

Saturday July 1, 5:00pm
Film Society of Lincoln Center

With director Chen Mei-juin in attendance

Chen Mei-juin
陳玫君

After graduating from National Taiwan University in 1989, Chen Mei-juin moved to Los Angeles where she earned her master's degree in visual anthropology at the University of Southern California. In 1993, she founded Lotus Film Productions and produced a series of documentaries exploring iconic figures in both American and Chinese culture including Hollywood Hotel (1994), which chronicles the eccentric tenants of a resident hotel on Hollywood Boulevard and The Worlds of Mei Lanfang (2000), about the Peking opera legend. She is also known for a slew of martial arts documentaries including the PBS production The Black Kung Fu Experience, which spotlights several African American trailblazers such as Ron Van Clief. With the Kinmen island-shot The Gangster's Daughter, her first narrative feature, Chen says, "I wanted to make a really fine commercial film that is full of Taiwanese elements. It is a film about Taiwanese society."