ARCO Theatre (Palm Canyon Theatre)
By Robert St. Martin
Palm Springs, CA (The Hollywood Times) 1/4/26 – One quietly charming film that has been in theatres since November is Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl, a bittersweet story set in Taipei, Taiwan. She has collaborated in the past with Sean Baker who is known for his Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket and most recently his Oscar-winning Anora. Shih-Ching Tsou co-wrote her solo directorial debut, Left-Handed Girl, with Sean Baker in 2010, which makes it feel like something of a long-lost prequel to the films that put Baker on the path to Oscar glory with last year’s Anora. Shot on an iPhone as was Tangerine, Left-Handed Girl was made with a lot of ingenuity, verve, and heart.
Left-Handed Girl puts you right in the middle of the action in Taipei’s bustling night market, bursting with hot pinks and bright greens. And it features a thrilling performance from young Nina Ye, who’s already a veteran child star at only age 9. The film was launched in early November at the Asian World Film Festival in Culver City and has become a Netflix hit. It was selected as Taiwan’s submission for Best International Foreign Film at the 2026 Academy Awards. It has been included in the Palm Springs International Film Festival with a screening on January 2, at 2:00 PM. See details below.
Shih-Ching Tsou has collaborated with Sean Baker, who tends to center his films on scrappy protagonists with a single-minded focus on achieving success for themselves. Tsou’s multigenerational tale, though, is cut from a different cloth. Long before its climax, the film reveals a devotion to melodrama as it teases out the intersecting ambitions and intertwined fates between the characters on screen.
Against the bright neon lights of Taipei’s night market, single mother Shu-fen (Janel Tsai) opens a noodle stall in an attempt to scrape together enough money to crawl out of debt. She’s uprooted her family from their home in rural Taiwan and moved back to the country’s bustling capital. Yet this long-suffering mother gets more than she bargains for when the actions of the two children in her care, impressionable five-year-old I-Jing (Nina Ye) and rebellious 20-year-old I-Ann (Ma Shih-yuan), who both manage to disrupt the lives of their extended friends and family.
Pensive mom Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai) has set up a night market noodles stand, and the volatile I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma) left high school and works at a betel nut stall, where she’s sleeping with her boss. I-Jing, played by a very charming Nina Ye, starts a new school and, with the wonder only a child can have, tests out the potential of this newly anointed devil hand.
Unlike the leads in Baker’s films, who are often jostling to escape their work and family situations, the central family of Left-Handed Girl is more resigned to their fate. They settle into their poky new apartment, while Shu-Fen prepares her noodle stall in a busy marketplace with stoic determination. Her daughters are more mixed in their approaches. I-Jing is wide-eyed and innocent enough to accept her new home and school, but I-Ann is distant to the point of antagonism. Taking a job in a legal high joint (with an under-the-table sideline in sex work), I-Ann is forever frustrated by her failure to graduate and get to university, and her apparent inability to move beyond this current station.
The film’s most outsized character, I-Ann, Shu-fen’s eldest daughter, throws responsibility to the wind in her pursuit of some kind of independence, might propel the story forward with the dilemmas created by her insolence. She finds work in the nut shop with a young owner who seems to specialize in seducing young women. I-Ann’s independence and insistence on wearing skimpy sexy clothes leaves her in a position to attract the attention of many male clients.
Chou and Baker’s script leans into the tension between mother’s forbearance and daughter’s frustration. When I-Ann learns that her mother is still shouldering I-Ann’s absent father’s debts, she is understandably furious. In her first onscreen role, Ma gives a firecracker performance. For the first half of Left-Handed Girl, she is almost unlike ably abrasive, but her softer side slowly and necessarily emerges as time goes on.
However, it’s the cherubic I-Jing who’s the gentle heart of Left-Handed Girl. She is an astonishing discovery to play I-Jing. Any number of harsh truths and revelations bear down on our central family in Left-Handed Girl, but I-Jing has to bear witness to them and process them as best a six-year-old can. Little I-Jing doesn’t see her left-handedness as a badge of honor. Shu-fen’s traditional father (Akio Chen) is superstitious, believing that I-Jing’s dominant left hand is possessed by the devil. He thinks the left hand is brimming with satanic vibes and orders his granddaughter never to use her left hand to eat, in his presence. Children tend not to swallow shame as easily as adults do, and I-Jing’s desire to suppress her true self spirals outward into a web of destruction. e’s inherited create a vortex that sucks down everyone around her.
Like any child taught to see what comes instinctively to her as abnormal, this causes her to suffer from profound existential angst. Children tend not to swallow shame as easily as adults do, and I-Jing’s desire to suppress her true self spirals outward into a web of destruction. I-Jing’s grandmother dismisses all this as silly superstition and chides her husband for frightening the child. I-Jing’s grandmother (Xin-Yan Chao) is partaking in an immigration scam to make extra money, while mother and sister continue to slave away at their respective jobs. These and other various plot threads come and go in Left-Handed Girl, all stitched together by Baker’s colorful but fluid editing.
From Shu-Fen’s romance with neighboring stallholder Johnny (Brando Huang), to I-Ann’s woes with her boss and coworkers, the plot of Left-Handed Girl is pulled here and there from one scene to the next. It’s oddly reminiscent of a Mike Leigh film (despite moving at a pace he might find too screwball), relegating its narrative behind the characterizations before the emergence of secrets and lies that drive these people to do what they do. Combined with Chou’s assured direction, focused on the faces that betray deep wounds, it’s a heady way of throwing the audience into the chaos of these women’s lives. The speed at which everyone has to move in this hurly-burly world might grate on some, but a glimpse of I-Jing marching forth to put her stamp on the world brings the film to heel time and time again.
As she starts pocketing trinkets at the night market with the cursed limb, separating a good hand that does what’s expected of it and the other that entertains what the heart desires, Tsou gracefully reflects each character’s own dualities. Here, the film delineates the complexities between what a person feels duty-bound to and what she truly wants: Shu-Fen can’t untangle herself from her trash ex-husband’s debts. I-Ann feels relegated to the role her mom wants her to play as she watches her peers move forward. I-Jing is told to be seen and not heard.
Tsou, along with Baker as editor and Ko-Chin Chen and Tzu-Hao Kao as cinematographers, skillfully lands us on to each family member’s separate planets, many shots capturing the frisky and delightful rhythms of daily Taipei life. We’re eye-level with I-Jing as she makes her first pilfering, the adrenaline rushing through with a camera shaky and beat staccato. The camera pans overhead as I-Ann rides her scooter at night, city lights glistening in the heat, bringing an expansive feeling of freedom with a pain that’s hers alone to feel.
A sense of duty is deftly woven into each conundrum, as well as the loneliness that comes with it, duty is often a solitary experience. We see it when I-Jing tries in earnest to draw with her right hand, when I-Ann lays in bed after being scorned at an ex-classmate’s motel party. Meanwhile, Shu-Fen scrambles to make rent, her own mom annoyed she needs help yet again. “A married daughters like water that’s poured out,” says the grandma (Xin-Yan Chao); a son would have still been her responsibility.
There are also moments of levity and playfulness, especially with the grandma’s flashes of indignation, time with a meerkat that becomes I-Jing’s pet, and I-Jing’s general delight with the world (relayed with an exuberance that feels akin to previous Tsou and Baker film The Florida Project). Ye (who is left-handed in real life) perfectly walks the tightrope of an innocent child absorbing the financial realities and unknown entities, Shu-Fen’s ex, the grandma’s hijinks, I-Ann and Shu-Fen’s bickering, that surround her. Ma’s I-Ann, too, is a considered portrait of an acerbic teenager dealing with grief, making it feel like an undeniable but unaffordable emotion in an environment where everyone’s just trying to survive.
By the soap opera-like penultimate dinner scene, the clan has nurtured big secrets that lead to the ultimate Taiwanese diu lian (losing of face): getting humiliated in front of an audience (specifically your extended family, the most horrifying way to go down). And the revelations are good, by that point, it’s like discovering a juicy, painful secret about a dear friend. Tsou and Baker’s script sharply examines what it really means to lose face: which shames are noble, which are indulgent and what should be passed from one generation to the next?
Left-Handed Girl has three screenings at the Palm Springs International Film Festival: FRIDAY, JANUARY 2, 2026, 2:00 PM at Festival Theaters 2; SUNDAY, JANUARY 4, 2026, 8:00 PM at the Palm Springs Cultural Center 2/3; MONDAY, JANUARY 5, 2026, 5:30 PM at the Festival Theatres 7. All screenings are sold-out but stand-by is available. Director and Producer Shih-Ching Tsou and Producer Sean Baker are expected to attend the January 7th screening.
