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Florentia 百花公主

FLORENTIA | 25 min | Taiwan | Mandarin Chinese (English subtitles) | Drama / Meta-theatre

Florentia is a chamber film in the strictest sense: one theatre, a handful of rooms, and a performance asked to carry everything. It is built around a single week in which several clocks, private and political, begin to close on a woman's body at the same time. Three weeks before opening night of a 400-year-old tragedy, 44-year-old Taiwanese Chinese Opera star Wu Si-Guo discovers she is pregnant; at her age, the doctor tells her, this will be the last time her body offers her this choice. Her father, a refugee from the Chinese Civil War who sent her to opera school as a child, has already written the name for the unborn child. Her ex-husband, the child's father, is circling the press, waiting to ride her comeback. The classical script demands the princess, having loved a spy from a larger empire across the border, fall on her sword for her family and her lost kingdom. On her father's old radio, military aircraft cross the strait day after day, like weather. The film stays very close to her while all of it arrives.

The decision in front of her has no clean answer. To keep the child would hand her father the heir he has prayed for, bind her for life to a man she has already left, and risk pouring her own unlived life into a child the way every role she has played was poured into her. To refuse would close, for good, a door her body will not open again, and she cannot honestly promise herself she will never grieve it. Every reason she can reach for was handed to her by someone else. The one voice missing from the decision is her own. After a lifetime of performing women written by men, she no longer knows what she, herself, wants, and the film is the story of the week she fights to find out.

Almost nothing in it is said aloud. The pressures arrive sideways, through a radio left on in the next room, a meal set down on a table, eight kilograms of embroidered silk, a pair of shoes. The quiet is deliberate. The pressure on her is never force. It is love, and the silent assumption that she will do what the women before her did.

All of this is carried in the body of one performer. Huang Yu-Lin, who plays Si-Guo, is the only living woman in Taiwan trained in the Mei Lanfang school, and what she does here is less acting than inheritance. Each rehearsal day she steps into qiao shoes, elevated platforms that force her onto the pointed tip of what was once a bound foot, carrying forward a practice that broke and reshaped Chinese women's feet for centuries for the pleasure of men. The shoes are not a costume. A tradition reshapes her through them, and teaches her to call the reshaping beautiful.

  • Yen-Ju Lee
    Director
    To Pluto
  • Yen-Ju Lee
    Writer
    To Pluto
  • Chin Hsuan Sung
    Producer
    The Man Who Couldn't Leave
  • Stephanie Su
    Producer
    The Man Who Couldn't Leave
  • Yu-Lin Huang
    Key Cast
    "Wu Si-Quo"
  • Zhi-Ying Zhu
    Key Cast
    "Wu Si-Qi"
    Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution
  • Shih-Chieh King
    Key Cast
    "Father Wu"
    Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster
  • Ying-Hsuan Kao
    Key Cast
    "Li Rong-Kai"
    Incantation
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Runtime:
    25 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    October 11, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    60,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Taiwan
  • Country of Filming:
    Taiwan
  • Language:
    Mandarin Chinese
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    1.85:1
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Director Biography - Yen-Ju Lee

Born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, Yen-Ju Lee (李晏如) holds a Bachelor's degree in History and Journalism from National Taiwan University, and a Master’s degree in Film Production from The London Film School.

With over a decade of experience in cultural journalism and copywriting, her creative path bridges narrative structure, emotional nuance, and critical inquiry. Her works explore themes such as gender empowerment, intergenerational trauma, family dynamics, and psychological transformation.

Yen-Ju specializes in blending conceptual storytelling with emotional resonance, often infusing her scripts with suspense, humor, and layered character arcs. In 2020, she founded 'Val Productions' (別有映像工作室), focusing on cinematic narratives that are concept-driven, emotionally affecting, and socially aware.

Her work spans films, music videos, and commercials, collaborating with partners such as TaiwanPlus, Taiwan Public Television Service, TAICCA, the Taipei Film Commission, Chunghwa Telecom, Avex Music, FireOn Music, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the Barbican Centre, and NGOs like the Awakening Foundation, among others.

• International Residencies & Festival Selections
In 2023, Lee was selected by TAICCA to represent Taiwan at the Goedam Residency (Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival) and Platform BUSAN at the Busan International Film Festival, expanding her network in Asian genre and independent cinema.

• Feature Film Development
- Her debut feature Please Imagine Love and Light has been in development since 2022, exploring themes of spiritual healing and emotional reawakening.
- Her second feature Leftover Women Detectives was selected for the 58th Golden Horse Film Project Promotion (FPP), received TAICCA development funding, and advanced to the final stage of TAICCA’s Script Enhancement Program, mentored one-on-one by acclaimed Korean screenwriter Bae Se-Young (Extreme Job, Intimate Strangers).

• Narrative Short Films & Distribution
Her short film To Pluto, starring Golden Horse Best Actress Hsieh Ying-Hsuan and Hong Kong Film Award winner Tai Bo, explores father-daughter grief through astrological metaphor.
- Awards: Best Student Film at British Independent Film Festival and Amsterdam Film Festival, Best Short Film at Red Dot Design Award, Grand Prize at MOD Microfilm Competition.
- Festival selections include academy awards qualifying festivals such as HollyShorts Film Festival and Atlanta Film Festival (New Mavericks showcase, 6 women directors selected from over 7,000 entries), etc.
- The film is distributed by Activator Co., Ltd and available on Catchplay, MyVideo, Hami, MOD, PTS+, iTunes and more.

• Documentary Work
Directed the short documentary A Taiwanese Dan in collaboration with prominent journalist Chi-Fei Fan, exploring gender expression in contemporary Taiwanese Peking opera. The film is available worldwide via the TaiwanPlus platform.

• Industry Collaborations
Worked with TaiwanPlus, TAICCA, Taipei Film Commission, Chunghwa Telecom, Avex, FireOn Music, Awakening Foundation, The Hague Museum of Art, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, FNV Netherlands, Barbican Centre (London), Art Represent, among others, across branding, public communication, music video, and social engagement storytelling.

• Writing & Literary Awards
Former arts and culture columnist with publications including United Daily News, World Journal, Initium Media, Performing Arts Review, GQ Taiwan, and more.
Literary honors include: First Prize, Kaohsiung Youth Literary Awards (Fiction); Excellence, First Prize, National Taiwan Literature Camp (Fiction).

• Personal Website
https://yenjulee.com/

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

This film began in my grandfather's living room. Like Si-Guo's father, he fled China during the Civil War and could never return; he watched televised opera every night until he died. While other children watched cartoons, I sat through three-hour operas beside him. I thought he was watching entertainment. I understand now he was watching the homeland he had lost. He gave me the form. Years later, as a performing arts journalist, I met the women who would show me what could be done with it.

What those women have done is a history almost no one outside the island knows. Chinese Opera in the mainland remains a male-led institution, an arm of state cultural policy. When the form was carried to Taiwan after the Civil War in 1949, the women of the theatre began to take it over from the inside, in a way the tradition had never allowed. Over two generations they became its lead performers, its directors, its troupe leaders, turning the gestures men had invented to perform an idealised femininity back against the script. Princesses written to die for love began, very quietly, to stop dying. In Taiwan the form is never only an art form; it carries the residue of an empire that now threatens the island's sovereignty, and the slow public reckoning with that inheritance, what we call "de-sinicization," runs straight through it. Florentia is a small act in that reclaiming, made in gratitude to those women, and to him.

It stars Huang Yu-Lin alongside Chu Chih-Ying (Ang Lee's Lust, Caution) and Jin Shi-Jie (Edward Yang's Terrorizers, Hou Hsiao-Hsien's The Assassin). The score is by Wan Pin Chu, winner of Best Original Score at the 43rd Hong Kong Film Awards. It was produced by Chin Hsuan Sung, producer of the Venice Immersive Grand Prize winner The Man Who Couldn't Leave.