We interview Left-Handed Girl writer-director Shih-Ching Tsou about her creative process, her approaches to casting and shooting in her native Taiwan.
In Left-Handed Girl, Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai) takes her children, teenager I-Ann (Shih-yuan Ma) and little moppet I-Jing (Nina Yeh), to her hometown of Taipei to set up a noodle stall, but their new home and circumstances bring challenges and bitter truths. As I-Jing contemplates her place in her family and new city, her grandfather’s admonition of her use of her left hand to eat and perform tasks gets her wondering how else she can use her sinister limb.
Shih-Ching Tsou makes a charming and energetic debut as a solo feature director. Having spent over two decades collaborating in a number of roles with Anora and The Florida Project director Sean Baker, Tsou makes her own mark with Left-Handed Girl (with Baker serving as co-writer and editor). This impressive debut is full of heart and humor. In our interview, read what she told us about her story-driven style, the process of finding this particular story, how she filled that story with great actors, and much more.
Shih-Ching Tsou on waiting to make her own film with Left-Handed Girl
It’s been over 20 years since you made Take Out. Why the big gap between directing projects?
Shih-Ching Tsou: It’s just the timing. We wanted to make Left-Handed Girl for a very long time. This is actually the first idea I wanted to make with Sean [Baker], even before Take Out, but at the time, we knew it wasn’t possible. There were so many characters and so many locations, and we were both very green. Sean was editing his first first feature when I met him, and I never went to film school. We just kind of found the will to make films through loving the same type of movies. We watched almost all the Dogme 95 films together, and we thought, “Wow, that’s such a pure form of telling a story.” Nothing fancy, no music, no big stars, but just beautiful, beautiful stories. We wanted to make something like that.
What was the process of finding Left-Handed Girl’s story like?
S.T.: We went back to Taiwan to try to flesh out the story in 2001, but then we realized the whole project was just too big, so we went back to New York to make Take Out in 2003. It only took the two of us, and around $3,000 to make that film. In 2008, we finally brought Take Out to theaters, and we thought, “maybe it’s time to go back to Taiwan and try to write a script for Left-Handed Girl”. We went to Taiwan in 2010 and we stayed there for a month visiting all the night markets in Taipei, and doing casting with college students. We really wanted to make this film, but in the end we still couldn’t.
In 2010, we went to the night market in Taipei, and we ran into this little girl who was five years old. She was so cute, just running around in the market, and we followed her back to her mother’s stand. We were so excited, because she was just like the girl in our story. This story suddenly felt real! We made friends with the girl and her mother, and we shot a trailer with her running around. It’s actually really similar to the feeling and the look of the final film. We brought this trailer to two different film markets: the Golden Horse Film Festival in Taiwan, and the Film Independent Fast Track in Los Angeles. We didn’t find money because, at the time, Asian cinema wasn’t really known globally and people didn’t want to watch movies with subtitles.
Keeping the creative drive going
How did you overcome that outside hesitation to make a film like this?
Shih-Ching Tsou: I just kept working on Sean’s other films, and we kept on making films using pretty much the same method we developed together in Take Out: how to get into communities, talk to them, make friends. We wanted to put their stories into the script, and to shoot on real locations. We just continued working on projects and collecting a body of work, so it would be easier to show an investor that we can do this.
In 2021 we went back to Cannes with Red Rocket in the main competition, and I think that really opened doors for us. One production company, Le Pacte, loved the story of Left-Handed Girl, and they said that if we could get a Taiwanese government subsidy, then they would help us make the film; that’s how we finally made it.
Did you find the wait to find funding impacted your creative drive?
S.T.: I think I didn’t even feel like I wanted to direct my own film, because working on Sean’s movies is so fulfilling. I got to do everything that a director does: casting, location scouting, costume design, script supervising. It’s like a creative energy; I was doing almost everything with Sean, and I was so fulfilled that I didn’t feel the need to do anything else. At the same time, I had gotten married by then, and I had a daughter, so I wanted to spend time with her. When I’m not making films with Sean, I’m basically a full time mother and housewife, and that takes a lot of my time. When we felt it was right, and when we finally got money, I then felt like it was time to go to Taiwan and make the movie. I took my daughter with me to Taiwan for a month of pre-production.
Shih-Ching Tsou on casting Left-Handed Girl
The cast is a mix of professional actors and amateurs. Did you always have it in mind to use a mix of professionals and amateurs?
Shih-Ching Tsou: In the role of the mother, Janel Tsai is a very famous model and TV actress. How I found her is, after she had just won a Best Supporting Actress in Taiwan’s TV Emmys, I saw one of her interviews where she was talking about wanting to take a role that she had never played before, one that would be more challenging. I just took that opportunity. I thought we could try to cast her, because actresses at that age are kind of hard to get, as they don’t want to play the older role. She’s really good, because her role is really kind of muted. I think she did a really good job of presenting that role and making her character pop in her own way.
With the older sister, I-Ann, I always wanted to do street casting. I wanted a fresh face. I couldn’t be in Taiwan for long, so I just went on to Instagram, searching through Taiwanese models. I was going through all the profiles one by one. My husband was like, “What are you doing? Why are you on Instagram constantly?” I said, “Well, I’m casting!” Eventually, I came across Ma Shih-yuan’s profile. My gosh, she looked exactly like I-Ann in my head; I felt like she had the right aura.
What was it about Nina Yeh that made you decide she’d be your left-handed girl?
S.T.: It was her audition tape. She was playing pretend, and her mom was telling me how much she liked to play pretending games. Her mom recorded her, and she was doing everything, but she didn’t feel like she was told what to do, and she still came across as very natural. When I saw that, I saw she had that very innocent look, very cute, and the performance was not stylised. Although she already had three years of acting experience in commercials, she still came across as very fresh.
Shih-Ching Tsou on filming Left-Handed Girl
Did you feel constrained by the setting or various producers backing the project? Or did you have free rein to tell the story you wanted?
Shih-Ching Tsou: I had free rein, actually, because I was the only producer on set. I could do whatever I wanted to do. But it’s also a curse, because I had to be responsible for everything. I hired a Taiwanese line producer (Pao-Ying Chen) who knows everybody in the industry in Taiwan, and she was able to help me form the filmmaking team. This team is so, so crucial, because I needed people who could really go and do the dirty work. I couldn’t have any assistants running around; we needed a very small team. I knew everything was going to be shot on location, so you couldn’t have 40 people on set.
Even on the first day, I remember we were shooting in the night market. We had around 20 people on our crew, and they all wore black T-shirts, which is what Taiwanese crews wear. After we set out our noodle stand, they all went across the street, to watch and wait. Suddenly, all the people who were walking through the night market all stopped, because they knew I was shooting a movie, and then nobody wanted to leave! They were just standing there, wanting to see. Some people even took out their camera and started shooting! The second day, I approached people and told them, ”If you have nothing to do here, if you are not cinematographers or the lighting person, you have to either leave or you blend in and not wear a black shirt.” That was a special rule: nobody should have worn a black shirt, so nobody would know that we were making a movie.
We only had six people on set: two cinematographers, the supervisor, myself, the sound man and the lighting person. It was just the bare minimum, and then we just continued like that, because that’s the only way you can capture the real night market. We fit in so well, people actually came to order noodles from our stall!
What are you working on next?
S.T.: Well, I’m still collecting ideas. When I travel to different cities and countries, I always hear interesting stories from the locals. I have been hearing fantastic ideas for stories, so hopefully, one day, I’ll be able to make a movie in a different city and tell a different story from a very specific area.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Left-Handed Girl was screened at the Cannes Critics’ Week, and at the BFI London Film Festival. The film had a limited theatrical release on November 7, 2025 and will be available to stream globally on Netflix from November 28. Read our review of Left-Handed Girl!
Header credits: Poster for Left-Handed Girl (Netflix) / Shih-Ching Tsou attends the BFI London Film Festival screening of Left-Handed Girl (Jack Hall/BFI London Film Festival)