Cloudy Days
2019 · 22m · Taiwan
Directed by Chuang Yung-Hsiang
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A-Yun, a middle-aged Vietnamese woman, remarries an elderly Taiwanese man and brings her young son into a household where she is dutifully devoted but never accepted. Trapped in a loveless, suffocating marriage, her repressed desire begins to drift toward her considerate adult stepson.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the stepson arc to detonate into melodrama—instead Chuang lets desire breathe as quiet asphyxiation, which is either radical restraint or cowardice depending on your mood, and honestly I'm still not sure which way I fall.
The film's architecture—how it uses domestic routine and spatial constraint to build a taxonomy of longing across cultural and generational boundaries—stakes itself in a precise lineage of East Asian cinema that understands repression as both subject and method.
The decision to never cut away from A-Yun's face during the moments she lets herself look—held, unguarded—is what transforms a premise about forbidden wanting into something genuinely about survival; everything else serves that one choice.
Festivals
- Palm Springs International ShortFest 2020
- Chaktomuk Short Film Festival 2020