This Taiwanese Director Just Won Berlin's Teddy Award for Telling One Gay Family's Story

"I've never liked this film being labeled a gay documentary, because what I'm saying goes far beyond that. But if it gives people a less fractured, less fragmented, less one-sided way of seeing what gay people are actually like, I don't think that's a bad thing either."

Small Talk is director Huang Hui-chen's family story, about her and her lesbian mother. It lays her own life bare from her youth onward, and it was shot over a full 18 years. It is her first feature-length documentary.

Huang and her mother had long been estranged. Her mother, who is not good at talking, would not speak about the misfortunes of the past and would not discuss being a lesbian, and a gulf opened between them. To understand her mother, and to get closer to her, Huang picked up a camera and recorded their everyday conversations over many years, slowly uncovering her mother's past and letting the two of them admit to each other what they really felt.

After the film came out it drew even more attention for its "gay family" setting, and many people used it as a way into the debate over marriage equality. For Huang, that was not the result she had expected. It felt more like a coincidence she could not explain.

In 2012, Huang had a child, came to see the relationship with her mother differently, and decided to re-plan the documentary she had already been shooting for more than a decade. Taiwanese society was changing at the same time, and voices calling for marriage equality were surfacing. A group called the Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights was preparing to launch a petition drive to send a citizen-drafted marriage equality bill to the Legislative Yuan.

What Huang did not know was that four years later the documentary would shine at major film festivals: nominated for Best Documentary at the 2016 Golden Horse Awards, and winner of the Teddy Award at the 2017 Berlin Film Festival, a prize the festival created for LGBT-themed films. Nor could she have guessed how neatly the timing would fall: in 2016, when the documentary was finished, Taiwan's marriage equality bill was also making unprecedented progress.

At the awards ceremony, Huang said, "This award is the best gift for everyone in Taiwan who has worked for marriage equality."

Huang's mother is a lesbian, born in a conservative era that held to the old rule that a grown man marries and a grown woman weds. As the film tells it, her mother broke up with a girlfriend early in life and in the end went along with her family's arrangement and married a man. He turned out to be a compulsive gambler and a heavy drinker. Huang's mother was beaten again and again, and Huang herself was sexually harassed by her father.

When Huang was six, her mother took her and her younger sister and fled. The three of them then made a living doing qianwang work — a Taiwanese folk rite in which a medium chants sutras and performs song and dance at a funeral to see the dead on their way. It made for a childhood that was not "normal," and her mother never talked to her about the shadow those early misfortunes left, or about being a lesbian, even though she still brought girlfriends home from time to time.

For years after that, Huang lived with poverty and with contempt. "I was 20 then, and I had a lot of resentment in me. I didn't understand why my mother was a lesbian, why people outside kept talking about her that way — it put pressure on me. And why were we living right at the bottom, why couldn't I go to school?" Huang told QDaily, recalling the moment, full of questions, when she first thought of picking up a camera.

Huang did not train in film. In 1998, the Taiwanese director Yang Li-chou was shooting a documentary about qianwang and approached her family; that was the first time she learned what a documentary was. DV cameras reached the market in the 1990s and brought the cost of shooting down sharply. Huang bought one of her own, meaning to work through the questions in her head by making images.

Before she finished Small Talk, Huang made short films about migrant workers, people who lived with the same contempt and the same labels she did, using her camera to record their working conditions and their hardships in Taiwan. That was when she began to see how powerful a tool images could be.

In 2006 she finished the short documentary Ward 8 East (《八东病房》), about hospital patients who need long-term care and the migrant workers who care for them. In 2009, Wu Jiang Is Going Home (《乌将要回家》) followed the life of one migrant worker, and won her a Labor Golden Image Award.

"Making a documentary is absolutely not just switching the camera on, switching it off and cutting it on a computer. You have to know people and society deeply — without that, how do you say anything that actually has something in it?" Huang studied at Ludi Community University in New Taipei City, where she met people from sociology, psychology and other fields, many of them active in social movements, and they changed how she thought.

In 2008, Huang joined the street protests by the Sanying Tribe against forced eviction by the government, and there she met Hou Hsiao-hsien, who cared about the same issue. That meeting opened a different road for Small Talk.

Hou was curious how this young woman, so active in social movements, made a living. Huang explained that she worked at an NGO and shot documentaries the rest of the time, but that working alone as an independent made it hard to win the trust of institutions, and harder still to get funding.

"Why are you all being so polite? You never used my name to go ask for money." With that one line, Hou let Huang apply for grants through his film company, 3H Productions, and became the producer of Small Talk.

Small Talk ended up with funding from four institutions, among them Japan's NHK and the Busan International Film Festival.

Even so, Hou never interfered with the documentary while it was being made, though Huang reported her progress to him regularly. When she talks about the help she got from Hou, from Lim Giong, who wrote the score, and from Lei Chen-ching, who advised on the edit, gratitude is still in her voice — much as it was not long ago in Berlin, when she learned that her first documentary had won the Teddy Award. None of it was anything she could have predicted.

Small Talk was not, in fact, the first time Huang put her family on screen. To raise money she had earlier cut a 55-minute short version, Me and My T Mom (《我和我的 T 妈妈》), edited by Lee Nien-hsiu. The two versions tell the same story, but Huang admits their pace and their use of footage differ, and so does the way each one tells it.

After watching Small Talk, Hou told Huang that she might strike a balance between the long version and the short one. He even briefly thought of cutting a "producer's 2.0" himself — until he looked at the footage and saw what an enormous job that would be.

How do you fit a film shot over 18 years into a limited running time and still say, forcefully, what the director wants to say? That alone does not sound easy.

Small Talk's editor, Lin Wan-yu, told QDaily that the edit took half a year, and that she spent the first three months struggling. The struggle came from facing such long and such deep pieces of a life: she had to grasp exactly what the director wanted to convey in order to convey that life accurately. "This work has a purpose: to hand the right to speak to people who look powerless, and to let them tell their own story in their own words. I've never stood where they stand, so I had to keep asking myself what someone standing there would be thinking," she said.

Lin also said that when she hit problems in the edit, the veteran editor Lei Chen-ching happened to be on hand with a good deal of timely advice, which helped the film come together.

Small Talk tells a story inside a gay family, but anyone who has seen it will notice that the problems it raises are family problems anyone might have.

That helps explain why, when Small Talk screened at last year's Golden Horse Film Festival and this year's Berlin Film Festival, audiences responded mostly to the film itself, and to whether her relationship with her mother had changed. In a way, that pleased Huang more.

About the habit of summing the film up as a gay documentary, Huang says plainly how she feels: "I've never liked this film being labeled a gay documentary, because what I'm saying goes far beyond that. But if it gives people a less fractured, less fragmented, less one-sided way of seeing what gay people are actually like, I don't think that's a bad thing either."

Still, Huang admits that while she was making it she noticed Small Talk seemed to have a life of its own: every stage of the film lined up, by coincidence after coincidence, with the progress of Taiwan's marriage equality bill. In 2012 Huang gave birth to a daughter, found a new answer to the question of mother and daughter, and re-planned the film; that same year the petition drive for the marriage equality bill began. In 2014 Huang brought in a production team and started shooting, and the bill passed its first reading in the Legislative Yuan, meaning it cleared the first stage. By 2016, when the documentary was done, the bill had moved past where that first reading had left it two years before. And this April, when Small Talk opens in Taiwan, the bill may reach a decisive new turn — forward, or stalled.

"Sometimes when I think about it I get goosebumps. A film has its own time for being finished, and when it lands at such a coincidental moment, right alongside something like this, it feels as though there's some meaning in it," she said.

It is not so much that Huang avoids equating her film with a gay documentary. It is that she believes being gay should not be the only thing on the table — that you should not know a person through their sexuality alone. She uses her mother as the example: her mother is a lesbian, and she is also somebody's sister, somebody's partner, somebody's mother, and much else.

"Everyone has many identities. There's no reason that people in minority groups outside the mainstream should always be identified and known by that minority identity and nothing else," Huang said. What she hopes is that society can better understand the core of equality: that whether you are gay, straight, bisexual or anything else, choosing the way of life that suits you should not expose you to discrimination.

All of this is there in the conversations inside Small Talk:

— A grown man marries, a grown woman weds.

— If same-sex marriage were legal, would you get married? No, I think I'm freer on my own.

The first line, in the film, is Huang's uncle — her mother's older brother — giving society's view of what marriage is worth. The second is a conversation between Huang and her mother: her mother has had a number of girlfriends since she fled her marriage, and she still wants to "choose" not to marry again.

Last November, Huang was invited to a public hearing on the marriage equality bill, one of the events held to build public consensus during the review that followed the bill's first stage. There she said: "What made my life feel so wretched — that, and not the fact that my mother is a lesbian, was the real source of the hardest struggle in my life." She reached that conclusion after finishing Small Talk.

As a documentary director, Huang feels more is expected of her, as though she carried a social duty to speak up for certain causes. "Documentaries should have a social function and meaning, but I don't think that's the only kind of documentary worth existing. Watch more documentaries from abroad and you'll see that a documentary really is just one kind of film."

Just as she is uneasy about the world fixing Small Talk in place as a gay documentary, Huang now hopes people will watch and feel it as cinema, not only discuss the social questions it raises. "As a film it has the value of a film, so I think the best outcome is that both are achieved," Huang said.

We talked with Huang about more:

Q: QDaily

A: Huang Hui-chen

Q: I've heard Small Talk got a very good response when it screened at the Berlin Film Festival, but parts of its background are tied to local Taiwanese culture. Did you notice whether the audience could get inside that experience? And what did the discussion focus on?

A: Before going to Berlin I was mostly worried, since European film-going culture is very different. Even my mom asked, "Will they understand it?" What surprised me was that their reaction turned out to be almost exactly the same as the reaction in Taiwan. And the first thing people said after watching was, "Thank you for making this film."

I think they saw something that had to do with them. One important function of film is that you see yourself through it. Quite a few people in Berlin said they had the same kind of problems with their own mothers and had never dealt with them, and you find that audience in Taiwan and in Berlin alike.

I believe this film has, to a degree, genuinely crossed the barriers of culture and language. We all know the translation at the time couldn't carry the full meaning — it could only carry what was being said on the surface, and the details fell away. Even so the audience still picked it up. That's thanks to the images and the editing. They really did see things through the visuals, and that surprised me a lot.

Berlin is very friendly toward gay issues, so being gay isn't treated as a question that needs debating. I was happy and comfortable there, because what they discussed was more to do with the film itself, or focused on my mother and me — whether making this film had changed anything between us. That's what they cared about.

It's actually the same with Taiwanese audiences. We feel as though Taiwanese society right now is badly split, the two sides arguing without end. But among people who have seen the film, I believe none of them think that's the point. They see something larger instead, and that's what this film is trying to say.

If we're going to talk about gay people, I hope this is how everyone gets to know them: being gay is not just a label. Everyone has many identities, and there's no reason that minority groups outside the mainstream should always be identified and known by that minority identity and nothing else. I don't think it should work that way. Isn't there a better way for us to get to know a person?

The biggest thing I learned after becoming a mother is that no relationship is a given. Understanding each other always takes enormous effort. I think that's everyone's lesson, not something only gay families have to face.

Q: Could you talk about the different stages you went through over these 18 years of shooting? And during that time Taiwan's marriage equality movement did make progress, to varying degrees, didn't it?

A: I planned it out in 2012. I'd just had a child and I wanted to finish this film, and of course that also meant finding money, pitching it in various places. I remember getting a grant that September, and around the same time people were pushing the diverse-families bills. I thought, what a coincidence — as if something had been arranged, even though that wasn't what I set out to do.

Then in 2014 and 2015 the bill came around all over again, and I felt it was bound up with the life of this film. Sometimes when I think about it I get goosebumps. A film has its own time for being finished, and when it lands at such a coincidental moment, right alongside something like this, it feels as though the thing carries some meaning too, on the question of being gay.

I've never liked this film being labeled a gay documentary, because I feel what I'm saying goes far beyond that. But I also think that if, because of it, people really do get a less fractured way of knowing gay people, or a less fragmented and less one-sided way of seeing what being gay actually looks like, that's not a bad thing either.

The release date in Taiwan this April may even fall on the second reading. You wonder how there can be so much coincidence in the world. That date was simply when a slot opened up in the theaters; we didn't want to be too far behind the Berlin Film Festival. When we got back, someone told us the release happened to line up with the second reading, and right then I thought: there's no escaping this even if you try.

In terms of filmmaking, I'm actually afraid of the film being turned into nothing but an issue, because that would be a shame for my team. They are all very professional filmmakers, and what they were making was a film. I believe this film has value in itself, purely as a film. But if the only thing anyone ever discusses is the issue, then their work, their effort and their talent go unseen. So I very much hope both sides can be seen and discussed. As a film, it has the value of a film.

Documentaries do carry more social function than fiction films, of course — you need some degree of social meaning in them. So I think the best state is when both are achieved.

Rather than say this film is meant to speak up for marriage equality, what I'd rather say is that I really hope every person, whatever group you belong to — gay, straight, bisexual, whatever it is — should have the right to choose the way of living that suits you best, or simply to be yourself.

Q: In your view, is a documentary handed a mission of some kind?

A: Because of how things developed in Taiwan, people expect more social mission, and even expect documentary directors to have a strong sense of mission. But I hope that one day we won't only imagine it that way. That would be better.

A documentary is one kind of film. It's true that documentaries have to carry social function and meaning, and true that they carry more of it, but I don't think that's the only kind of documentary worth existing. Watch more documentaries from abroad and you'll see it really is just one kind of film, with no reason to carry more than any other. And if some directors work with that sense of mission, there's nothing wrong with that either. There has to be room for both. Even the film world badly needs "diversity" — in aesthetics, say, with all sorts of possibilities inside it. I think that's best.

The way I came to know documentaries is very unusual: I got to know them as someone being filmed, and then I became the one holding the camera. One thing a documentary can do that nothing else can is give something back to the person in front of the lens. Take my mom. I think she really did change after the shoot, and not only our relationship — she changed herself. Before she was filmed, she always felt domestic violence was shameful, not to be spoken of, not to be touched. But once the film was done, the audience's response to her was extremely warm. Everyone told her that her life experience was remarkable, and that there was nothing shameful about domestic violence.

It was rather like a process of being "empowered" — she empowered herself.

Cover image from Small Talk