Followed by a talk on Zoom

After learning of her childhood friend Mei-Hua’s murder, dance teacher Ling-Ling heads to Tokyo to investigate. There, she clashes with vicious gangsters and loses an eye, prompting her to build a troupe of female fighters seeking revenge against the men who abused them – hunting and killing them in the wildest fashions. In the 1980s, Taiwan had been under more than 30 years of martial law. During the final throes of a violent dictatorship a cinema featuring the underworld of the city emerged, subverting decades of propaganda cinema to reveal a long suppressed collective consciousness. Immersed in a milieu of drug trafficking, gambling, prostitution, and violent crime, Woman Revenger is an example of this resistant cinema.

The screening of this film is supported by the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute and the Taiwan Cinema Toolkit.

Ting-Wu Cho is a Ph.D. Candidate in Cinema Studies at New York University. Her dissertation project focuses on Taiwan Pulp, a group of understudied exploitation films in Taiwan in the late Cold War period. Her research interests include film industry studies, genre studies, media ethnography, and Chinese language cinemas, with a focus on Taiwanese film history. She is also a guest curator for Woman Make Waves International Film Festival, Taiwan.