On Location peels again the curtain on a few of your favourite movies, tv reveals, and extra.
Take Out co-director and The Florida Project producer Shih-Ching Tsou isn’t any stranger to braiding collectively the magic and the distress of dwelling on the planet’s hottest vacationer locations. For her newest movie, Left-Handed Girl, Tsou takes up the mantle of director and co-writer and turns her eager eye to the streets of Taipei. Similarly to Tokyo, the Taiwanese capital has lengthy been portrayed as teched-out carnival—roads pump out regular streams of buzzing mopeds, distributors beckon vacationers to benefit from the favorable trade fee on sundry devices, and evening market lights whirl and flash like an outsize pachinko machine.
Described by Tsou as a movie, “25 years in the making,” Left-Handed Girl takes a shaky, hand-held digicam view to the lifetime of I-Jing, a younger lady following her mom’s pursuit to open a noodle stand in a bustling evening market. Here, Tsou discusses how and the place scenes have been filmed on location throughout Taipei. The movie is on the market to stream on Netflix beginning November 28.
The evening market
A chock-a-block evening market is the central setting of the movie, the place “As Seen on TV” gadget salesmen, noodle hawkers, small-time carnies, and tchotchke distributors are lined shoulder to shoulder. “I remember the first time I showed [co-writer] Sean Baker Taipei in 2000, 2001, and immediately he fell in love,” says Tsou, “That was the primary time he went to Taiwan with me to search for the story. We each felt like, ‘Oh my God, we need to put the night market on film as one of the very important characters because that’s really representative of Taiwan, the culture of Taiwan.” Throughout the film, the market is depicted as an after-hours playground for sorts for I-Jing as she squeezes between stalls and ducks through alleyways as shortcuts to various stalls and friends. Shot all on iPhone and at upward angles, the market is treated with a curious and larger-than-life quality reflective of I-Jing’s perspective.
The noodle stand
Out of all of the attainable vendor sorts to select from, Tsou pulled from actual life instance. “That was actually inspired by a real family we met when we went back to Taiwan to write the script. We stayed there for a month, and we visited all the night markets in Taipei trying to find the perfect one to shoot,” says Tsou, “We actually went to the particular night market in the film, and we ran into this little little girl at the time in 2010.” A fired up five-year-old operating round by herself, Tsou adopted her as a information by way of the evening market, ultimately being led to her mother who was tending a noodle stand on the market. “When we ran into them, we were so excited because that was in our script, a little girl and her mother. So we thought, wow, that’s like a real prototype of the characters in our story. That’s why we decided to shoot in that market and also use the noodle stand as part of the story,” says Tsou.