Taiwanese cinema revisits serious issues in GF*BF
Wistful dramas have been the rage, but Yang Ya-che's new film harks back to New Taiwan Cinema with a serious look at recent history
The Taiwanese film GF*BF at first glance looks nothing more than a drama, but at its heart is a story with a revolutionary message.
The title stands for "girlfriend, boyfriend", which is what the film is known as in Chinese.
The plot centres on three friends entwined in a bizarre love triangle.
But from the get-go, Yang Ya-che's film strikes a political tone. Its opening sequence has girls converging in a co-educational school's playground after morning assembly, demanding the right to wear trousers by taking off their dress uniforms. They are wearing shorts underneath.
The director said the scene was based on a "very significant" protest in 2010, when students of Tainan First Girls' High School fought for their right to wear shorts instead of skirts.
"It's an incident which roused many Taiwanese people," said Yang during a recent visit to Hong Kong to promote the movie at the Summer International Film Festival. "We've been lazy about expressing our true feelings for a long time, thinking demonstrations are useless - and then we discovered the next generation doing the same thing we once did."
Screened in Taiwan in July, GF*BF is set for wider commercial release on Thursday.