Ri chang dui hua

Small Talk is a first-person documentary film that takes place in Taiwan. Huang Hui-chen records her life and tells the story of her mother, who is a lesbian woman and a survivor of domestic violence and sexual abuse. The film is extremely heavy and difficult to watch at times but also very compelling and tells a raw story of love, silence, and sacrifice. There is a quiet tension that runs through every conversation, as Huang and her mother struggle to bridge the emotional distance that has defined their relationship. Huang captures small, everyday moments with her mother that slowly build a portrait of pain, resilience, and complicated love. The storytelling is deeply personal and vulnerable, but it also touches on broader themes of generational trauma, queerness, and the emotional legacies that families pass down. The documentary's simple, unfiltered style makes it feel incredibly intimate and honest. This approach is extremely effective, yet at times brings into question where to draw the line between consent and emotional boundaries. Overall, Small Talk is a powerful exploration of one woman's experience as a middle-class queer woman in Taiwan, and the emotional toll her life has taken on both herself and her family.

Though this film is lesser-known, I think it should be more recognized for its realistic depictions of strained family relationships. It documents the filmmaker's complicated relationship with her mother through interviews and personal recounts. Huang Hui-Chen searches for closure in this film, where she confronts intergenerational trauma and repeatedly asks her mother if she loves her. Because Huang Hui-Chen now has a daughter of her own, I feel she needed to make this film to resolve the unanswered questions of her childhood.

With that being said, this film felt invasive at times and I constantly asked myself if it should have even been made. Her mother would say "stop filming," but the camera kept rolling. Did these tough conversations really need to be filmed? I believe Hui-Chen needed them to be so she had a greater reason to have them-not only for herself, but also for the audience and those who might relate to her story. This movie made me feel uncomfortable, but this is not a bad thing for a documentary of this nature.

This film also shines light on the queer communities of Taiwan and the treatment towards LGBTQ+ members. We rarely see how these communities are treated in non-Western countries, so I appreciated how the movie did so. A-nu, the mom, is not close with her family and they don't acknowledge her sexuality, which is sad but an honest representation of attitudes towards these members. This film is ultimately about family secrets and breaking the cycle of silence. It shows the importance of openness in sustaining healthy relationships in a way I haven't seen before.

An uncomfy movie, but glad I watched it.

In a simultaneously beautiful and heartbreaking documentary, the director attempts to repair her strained relationship with her butch lesbian mother. The movie shifts between interview segments interspersed with shots from the director's everyday life with her daughter and the director's mother. I thought it was a beautiful way to grapple with generational trauma and the implications and consequences of broaching taboo topics.

The movie also brings to mind something author Carribean Fragoza said in an interview with ZYZZYVA, "...sometimes trying to learn about our family history and extract stories from our mothers and grandmothers can be a kind of violence. Just because you're ready to ask these questions doesn't mean you get to have the information." I think this quote perfectly encapsulates the central theme of the film. While the director is ready to ask the difficult questions about her mother's and her past, the discomfort of her mother in digging up that history is painfully clear.

The added baggage of the ambiguity around whether or not Huang Hui-Chen got consent from her mother to film their conversations brings up questions of documentary ethics and to what lengths does one go to obtain truth and authenticity.

This film is a hard watch, but the conversations between Huang and her mother were always going to be difficult.

Love the last part of this film best! Do you love me? This question is asked for three times and no matter how people used to hide themselves, they can finally say the things they truly want to say.

This was an aching, emotionally restrained documentary that explores the intergenerational trauma and queerness within a Taiwanese mother and her daughter, and their extended family as well. Through a series of candid conversations with her estranged mother, uncles, and aunts, Huang explores her queer mother's silence on sexuality and the emotional distance between them that was shaped by cultural expectations and unhealed traumas. With staticky quiet, long and lingering shots, and clearly home-shot videos, the hesitation of family members to speak to Huang about her mother and their family dynamics speak volumes, even louder than the words they did speak sometimes. Leaning into this discomfort, there are often questions that family members and her mother refuse to answer altogether. As we witness the unbalanced process of confronting a past that has never fully been brought up to the light, I also found myself wondering about the ethics of Huang's cameraship - without her mother knowing about the distribution of the footage, and family members suddenly being asked to talk about queerness in an uncomfortable cultural context on video, I found myself wondering if this was something we were okay to even watch. However, this commitment to showcasing the real messiness of family, and the love that still connects them all today, also brings light to the emotional labor of telling stories within one's own family.