Nina Wu (灼人秘密) is the first Taiwanese film to stir conversations around the #MeToo movement.

The News Lens
Date: 2019/07/24
By: CJ Sheu

In October 2017, The New York Times broke the story about American film mogul Harvey Weinstein’s sexual crimes over some 30 years. It spurred a growing number of women (and some men) in the film industry to speak out about their own experiences of sexual harassment and assault by the rich and powerful, an event that later snowballed into the global #MeToo movement.

For some reason or other, the movement as a whole doesn’t seem to have penetrated into Taiwanese popular culture.

Until now.

Nina Wu (灼人秘密, literally “burning secret”), a film by Taiwan-based Burmese writer-director Midi Z (趙德胤), was first unveiled in the Un Certain Regard section of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It tells the story of the titular aspiring actress (Wu Ke-xi 吳可熙), whose career is finally launched by a Weinstein-like executive producer (Elton Tang 湯志偉).

The deck is stacked against her from the beginning, putting her at the mercy of the men around her. When she’s offered a star-making role in a WWII-era spy-romance film (called Spy Romance) with a nude threesome scene, her agent’s (Lee Lee-zen李李仁) assurance that she should only take the role “if you’re comfortable with it” sounds like mere boilerplate amidst his persuasion and cajoling. The Spy Romance director (Shih Ming-shuai 施名帥) is analytical and technically proficient, but he’s also abusive, choking and slapping Nina in a key scene to get a rise out of her, creating an atmosphere of fear on set that further isolates Nina. And then, of course, there’s the executive producer.    [FULL  STORY]