Screening and discussion of “飲食男女 (Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, 1994)”​. Eat, Drink, Man, Woman is a comedy-drama directed by Ang Lee 李安. The film uses food as a metaphor for family, tradition, and change, capturing unspoken tensions between generations.

Lifeworlds on two sides of the Taiwan Straits—Cinematic narratives 

In a cooperation between the Taiwan Studies Program, the Worldmaking Project and the Center for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS), we are offering a series of films this semester from Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China, depicting complex and conflicted sinophone realities and illustrating different ways of worldmaking, as

—prescribed in the form of “main melodies” by the powers that be, on one side of the Taiwan Straits: we unravel grandiose political narratives of revolution and revival, between dystopia and utopia.  

—described as reflections of the everyday, on the other side of the Taiwan Straits: we are given glimpses of “cotidian lives” among the petty, the poor, the marginalized, uncovering their function as heterotopia.  

As these films depict multiple “worlds within worlds”, from the point of view of those above, those below and those in between—from gangster boss, to ardent believer, from the young boy playing truant, to an old housewife, dressed to kill, they draw our attention to different types of subjectivities, vulnerabilities, desires and aspirations as effects of  everchanging biopolitics in the sinophone world. 

Film Schedule