Cover Shu Qi attending Toronto International Film Festival for her directorial debut ’Girl’ (Photo: Instagram/@sqwhat)
Shu Qi attending Toronto International Film Festival for her directorial debut ’Girl’ (Photo: Instagram/@sqwhat)
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With her directorial debut ‘Girl’, Taiwanese star Shu Qi transforms childhood scars into cinematic poetry. Already acclaimed at Busan and Toronto, the film is both an intimate reckoning with trauma and a meditative homage to Taiwan’s New Wave masters.
For more than three decades, Shu Qi has dazzled audiences with the magnetism of her screen presence, from Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 2001 romantic drama film Millennium Mambo to Stephen Chow’s 1998 comedy film The Lucky Guy. Now, for the first time, she has stepped behind the camera. Her debut feature Girl (2025) has already travelled through major festivals including Busan and Toronto, earning recognition for its lyrical intensity and quiet courage.
But for Shu, this film is less about breaking into directing than breaking a silence—one rooted in memories of childhood pain and survival.
“It came from my childhood memories,” she said in an interview ahead of the Hong Kong premiere on Tuesday (November 6, 2025). “I look back at my family of origin. In that house, there was domestic violence.” The film explores a teen girl growing up in an environment of fear, restraint and unspoken love: she lives with a dominating drunkard father, who hits his wife for his own failures; the mother, unable to leave the marriage, redirects her frustration at her daughter. In a way, it is a portrait distilled from fragments of Shu’s own past and decades of watching others repress similar wounds. While the film’s subject is dark, Girl avoids sensationalism; instead, it articulates fear through silence, space and a child’s perspective.
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Above Shu Qi and her husband Stephen Fung attended the Hong Kong premiere of ‘Girl’ at K11 Arthouse (Photo: Tatler Hong Kong)
Shu Qi and her husband Stephen Fung attended the Hong Kong premiere of ‘Girl’ at K11 Arthouse (Photo: Tatler Hong Kong)
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When asked what happens in a key sequence where a girl is suddenly pulled by an unseen hand into a room, Shu explains that the shot was never meant to dramatise the violence visually. “I don’t want to show those moments on screen,” she says. “I want the audience to fill in their own stories.” What emerges instead is suggestion: a door closing, a sound or the stillness that follows, through which viewers grasp the story’s terror and tenderness. For Shu, such restraint is integral to cinema’s power to express what cannot be spoken.
In Girl, the violence is cyclical, echoing from mother to daughter, from one generation’s pain to another’s confusion. Shu portrays this inheritance with empathy rather than judgement. Her protagonist, the young Xiao Li, vacillates between fear and tenderness for the mother who hurts her. “She sees her mother’s childhood,” Shu explained during a post-screening talk. “She realises her mother was also like her: fragile, not unloved but only taught love the wrong way.” The film’s final scenes exude neither reconciliation nor catharsis but a realism Shu insists on preserving. “Life doesn’t always solve itself with hugs and tears,” she says. “I think this is reality.”
The film’s roots reach back to the encouragement of Hou, her long-time mentor and a legendary auteur in Taiwan. “He told me to think of the social issues I wanted to take on,” Shu says. It was from this prompt that she turned inward, revisiting her past. The imaginary red balloon that drifts in one scene of her film is a direct homage to Hou’s Flight of the Red Balloon (2007). “I looked at the girl [Xiao Li’s younger sister] smiling and her school bag swinging,” she says. “I imagined there was a red balloon flying out of her bag and to different parts of the world, enjoying its freedom.”
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Above The trailer of ’Girl’ by Shu Qi
The visual language of Girl also gestures to another Taiwanese auteur, Edward Yang. Shu acknowledges his quiet influence. “Maybe subconsciously,” she says. “The mahjong sequences in my movie are like his in Yi Yi (2000).” Through such tributes, Girl connects generations of Taiwanese filmmaking that blend personal memory with a documentary gaze. In her own work, Shu transforms that lineage through a distinctly feminine lens—her attention to the textures of domestic life, and the emotional claustrophobia that can live inside apparent calm, marking a new turn in the island’s cinema.
Collaboration has been key to this evolution. Shu enlisted William Chang, Wong Kar Wai’s celebrated editor and designer, to work alongside her during the film’s conception. “After I finished the script, he asked me to strengthen the part between the father and mother,” she says. “It took me a few more years to make these characters more vivid.” The result is deliberate pacing and emotional density.
Though Shu’s long career as an actor gifted her with an intuitive grasp of performance, she found the discipline of directing to be a radical shift. “Being an actor is hard,” she says with a laugh, “but being a director is also hard, in a completely different way.” The difference, she says, lies in perspective. “As a director, you need to be both emotional and practical. When you talk to actors, you have to be feeling with them, but also stay clear enough not to follow them blindly. When you’re an actor, you only focus on the world of your character.”
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Above Shu Qi attending the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2025 (Photo: Instagram/@sqwhat)
Shu Qi attending the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2025 (Photo: Instagram/@sqwhat)
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Her approach to working with actors is rooted in trust and instinct. “I sometimes didn’t give them fixed lines,” she said. “I let them improvise. I told them to follow their instincts to explore their characters’ world.” On set, Shu often guided them quietly, walking alongside them through the space before a take. The result is performances that feel unforced yet simmering with emotion, particularly the young actor Bai Xiao-Ying (Xiao Li), whose understated strength anchors the film.
Despite Girl’s success, Shu speaks of directing with humility and fatigue. “It’s been more work than I expected,” she says. “After this, I just want to rest.” She has no concrete plans to write again soon, nor to rush into directing a second feature. “I’ll see if there are interesting scripts,” she says. “I’m not saying an absolute no to subsequent directing opportunities, but I need time away.”
For now, what she treasures most is the connection her story has made with audiences. “What I enjoy the most is when it resonates,” she reflects. “When people recognise something of their own life in the film.”
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Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
