UK Premiere
Daughter’s Daughter 女儿的女儿
C-FILMS IN FOCUS
Year of Production 2024
Production Countries/Regions
Taiwan
Duration 126 mins
Genres Drama Family LGBTQ+
Dialogue Language(s) Mandarin
Subtitle Language(s) English
Director(s) Xi Huang
Director’s Bio
A graduate of NYU Tisch, and now based in Taipei, HUANG Xi has worked closely with Hou Hsiao-Hsien since Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996). His own work focuses on contemporary urban relations, loneliness and chance. His debut, Missing Johnny (2017), was selected for Busan, Tokyo FILMeX, HK Asian FF and won awards at both the Taipei and Taipei Golden Horse Awards. Most recently, his HBO series, Twisted Strings (2022), featured Sylvia Chang and dissected the humor and absurdity behind death and desire. Daughter’s Daughter(2024)was nominated for Five Golden Horse Award, and he won the best original script award.
Synopsis
Following her daughter Zuer’s fatal accident, Jin’s shocked to discover that she’s now responsible for Zuer’s IVF embryo. With the fate of the embryo in her hands, she must confront her first daughter she gave up after a teenage pregnancy.
Festivals & Awards
2024 61st Taipei Golden Horse Film Awards – Best Actress and Four Other Nominations
2024 37th Tokyo International Film Festival – Main Competition – Best Film Nomination
2024 49th Toronto International Film Festival – Platform Award – Honourable Mention
Scriptwriter(s)
Xi Huang
Producer(s)
Dongxu Shao, Hsin-Li Liu
Executive Producer(s)
Hsiao-Hsien Hou, Sylvia Chang
Key Casts
Sylvia Chang, Karena Lam, Eugenie Liu
Curators’ note
Tracing the life of Ai, a woman living in Taipei after her divorce, a gentle portrayal unfolds—one shaped by three generations of women bound through unresolved intimacy. A sudden loss brings questions of motherhood, kinship, and care back into view, forcing a long-entangled mother-daughter relationship to confront what has remained unspoken. Reproduction here is no longer treated as an inevitable path within a fixed life script. Instead, queer, transnational, and non-nuclear perspectives open up new ways of imagining family. As IVF and practices of care are woven quietly into everyday life, motherhood shifts from a prescribed role to an ethical and emotional process, continually negotiated.
In the restrained yet quietly powerful performances of Sylvia Chang and Karena Lam, a naturalistic visual language gathers emotional force, allowing new forms of kinship to emerge beyond the structures of the conventional family. (Edited by Crystal Xinjie Wang and Xiyun Li, based on Viv Wang’s and Yang Wu’s notes)
Director’s Statement
Life’s choices are shaped by circumstances. In Daughter’s Daughter,Jin—once deprived of choice—now faces raising her granddaughter alone while grieving her daughter. Meanwhile, same-sex couple Zuer and Michelle confront restrictive regulations. The film examines, from a female perspective, how women navigate constraints, identity, and the burdens of love. Through Jin’s journey and others, it portrays the complex calculations of care, sacrifice, and the enduring mother-daughter bond, resonating with universal dilemmas of family, freedom, and acceptance in modern society.
