23rd New York Asian Film Festival

July 12-28, 2024

Photo: Courtesy of Magnify

North American Premiere

Pierce

刺心切骨

This darkly assured, deeply unsettling debut from Singaporean filmmaker Nelicia Low heralds an exciting new filmmaking voice. Fresh from its invitation to the prestigious Karlovy Vary competition, this taut Mandarin-language thriller centers on Zi-Jie (rising star Liu Hsiu-Fu), a prodigious Taiwanese teen fencer whose life is upended when his older brother (a mesmerizing Tsao Yu-Ning, best known for his role in “Kano” in 2014) returns from a seven-year stint in juvenile prison for killing an opponent on the fencing strip. Convinced of his sibling's innocence against his mother's (Ding Ning, who won a Golden Horse Award for her supporting role in “Cities of Last Things,” is here coiled intensity personified) vehement protests, the naive Zi-Jie soon finds himself ensnared in his brother's charismatic but dangerous orbit. What at first seems a conventional redemption tale gradually curdles into something far darker and more disquieting as Low meticulously chips away at Zi-Jie's romanticized notions, the fencing scenes slicing through the tension with visceral, athletic grace. A probing look at family trauma and youthful delusion, "Pierce" cuts straight to the heart.

Director: Nelicia Low
Cast: Tsao Yu-ning, Liu Hsiu-fu
Languages: Mandarin with English subtitles
2023; 104 min.

SCHEDULE:

Saturday July 13, 1:00pm
LOOK Cinemas W57

Intro and Q&A with director Nelicia Low

Sunday July 21, 6:30pm
LOOK Cinemas W57

Nelicia Low
劉慧伶

Nelicia Low is the younger sister to an autistic brother, and the daughter of two melodramatic Chinese-Singaporeans who seem to have emerged from a Latino soap opera. She used to be a National Fencer for Singapore, competing at the Asian Games in 2010. She will never admit to anyone that she only wanted to be a fencer because she loved The Lord of the Rings and the Star Wars movies growing up. Her short film Freeze, about her relationship with her brother, premiered at the 38th Clermont-Ferrand international Short Film Festival in 2016 and went on to screen at over 70 festivals around the world, including the 53rd Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival, Odense, and Busan. In 2018, she graduated with an MFA in Film Directing from Columbia University in New York. Her feature directorial debut, Pierce, a Singapore/Taiwan/Poland co-production about a younger brother's love for his enigmatic older brother, won her the Best Director Award at the 58th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in early July.