Experiencing Interruptions?

Florentia 百花公主

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

Three weeks before opening night of a 400-year-old Ming-dynasty 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 75-year-old father, a refugee from the Chinese Civil War who sent her to opera school as a child, has already written the pre-chosen generational name for her unborn child on paper ruled for vertical script. Her manipulative ex-husband, the father of the unborn child, is already circling the press, waiting to ride her comeback. The classical script, meanwhile, 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.

The role is played by Huang Yu-Lin, the only living woman in Taiwan trained in the Mei Lanfang school. Each rehearsal day she is wrapped in eight kilograms of embroidered silk and steps into qiao shoes, elevated platforms that force the performer onto the pointed tip of what was once a bound foot. The shoes are not a costume. They carry forward, into the present, a practice that broke and reshaped Chinese women's feet for centuries for the pleasure of men. Si-Guo wears them every day, to rehearse the death of a princess who has no choice. The film watches this transfer of weight, from history into a single body, very closely.

Structured as a play within a play, Florentia 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. One week remains before the curtain rises. Her body, the doctor has said, will not offer her this choice again. Her father is seventy-five, and the line of names he has carried since the war is running out of time. On his old radio, Chinese military aircraft cross the strait day after day, like weather. A fellow actress from the company says goodbye, with her young daughter, having decided to leave the island and the troupe before what might happen happens.

The form is not a flourish. It is, increasingly, the shape of a contemporary East Asian woman's life. The classical script, the refugee family, the island under threat, and the body running out of time, four pressures that earlier generations could meet one at a time, have begun to arrive together, in the same body, in the same week. Birth rates across the region have fallen below what any society has previously survived. Classical traditions are passing into the hands of their last living practitioners. Democracies that were once taken for granted are now uncertain from one morning to the next. The Taiwanese woman, the East Asian woman, is being asked to carry a child, a parent, an art form, and a country, in the same body, at the same time. The play within a play is the only form that could hold this. The two scripts run in parallel, until they don't.

And then the week runs out. On the night of the final rehearsal, Si-Guo steps onto the stage in eight kilograms of silk and lifts the sword for the last scene, the scene in which the princess is meant to die. Time slows. A sound rises out of her, somewhere between sobbing and laughter, breaking the script open. Her hand falls. She turns, looks into the camera, and runs her fingers, slowly, along the edge of the blade. She does not bring it down. Sometimes the most radical act a woman can make, after a lifetime of performing endings written by other people, is to refuse the one she was given.

  • 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
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

The film began in my grandfather's living room. He was a refugee from the Chinese Civil War who 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 could never go back.

Years later, working as a performing arts journalist, I met the women who, since the form arrived in Taiwan in 1949, have quietly taken Chinese Opera into their own hands, learning every gesture men had used to perform femininity and turning it back on the script. Princesses written to die for love began, very quietly, to stop dying. Huang Yu-Lin carries that lineage in her body. Florentia is offered in gratitude to that quiet refusal, and in conversation with the female-led reinvention of pansori and changgeuk across the region.

The film was shot inside the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, the Mecanoo-designed performing arts complex in southern Taiwan, all white concrete and cold curves. Inside this western architecture of the future, a Taiwanese woman in eight kilograms of embroidered silk rehearses a 400-year-old Chinese tragedy. The Dutch were Taiwan's first colonisers in the seventeenth century. A Taiwanese woman performs the cost of an inherited Chinese empire, inside a building drawn by the descendants of an earlier European one, while the radio outside reports the approach of the next. East and west, past and future, tradition and the architecture asked to hold it, none of it resolves. The camera holds the contradiction and lets it stay contradictory.

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