Interview: A Brighter Summer Day for The Lady Avengers

CiLENS: The choice of using a no-dialogue film is really striking and provocative, and we’re curious about the decision behind it. Could you share more about how the soundscape shapes your reinterpretation of the feelings and desires of your female character?

 

Birdy: The reason why I chose to make a no-dialogue film is because I wanted to play with the soundscape. I wanted to draw attention to the moviegoing experience. When we talk about films, we often focus on stories, which are largely constructed through language. But for me, my moviegoing or film experience is really about how sound waves affect me — how they touch our bodies.

 

For example, when you go to a concert that’s really loud and you stand next to the speaker, your body vibrates with the sound. That’s the kind of experience I wanted to explore — how sound waves touch us before we cognitively understand the meaning that’s created by language.

 

So the decision to make a no-dialogue film also came from my desire to challenge the idea of starting from the conventional screenwriting phase. I wanted to go against traditional scriptwriting, where words often serve to describe actions or dialogue. In my script, the words were more like descriptions of sounds and individuals, rather than a linear plot.

 

Certain feelings, especially body memories are the kind of experiences my short film tries to offer. Because I think movies “move” us both visually and emotionally, I wanted to trigger sensations and feelings through soundscapes, where language reaches its limit.

 

My film is also about the sexual awakening of Asian women, who are often portrayed as sad on the big screen — always suffering, or as self-sacrificial mothers and daughters who are not expected to have desires, even though they are often depicted as objects of desire.

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CiLENS: Before this film, you had been primarily engaged with video essays and theoretical writing through your academic background. How did you come up with the idea of filmmaking, and what was your experience of rewriting Ming’s story — and, in a sense, rewriting history?

 

Birdy: This project was actually my thesis film at San Francisco State University. I first explored this topic while writing a paper on Italian Giallo films. I watched a lot of them during COVID over Zoom with friends, and that’s when I realized that during Taiwan’s martial law period — which lasted for thirty-eight years, from right after World War II until the end of the Cold War — all the “naughty” or “fun” things, especially anything involving the female body, were not supposed to be on the big screen.

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But I later found out that many Giallo films, Japanese pink films, and West German exploitation films were actually smuggled into Taiwan. So there existed this kind of adult moviegoing experience.

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I learned about this history thanks to scholars like Chan Hsuan-En, who studied Taiwan’s adult film history in the 1970s and 1980s. She interviewed many moviegoers from that time, and they described how projectionists would cleverly edit films to avoid government inspection — showing an official version when the agents were around, and switching to “the good stuff” when they weren’t. Sometimes they would even insert a hot scene of a certain character from another film — completely out of nowhere.

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It wasn’t about the film’s narrative at all — it was about creating tiny spectacles. I don’t know if you’ve seen Fight Club. There's a scene where Brad Pitt’s character, who works at a movie theater, inserts a single frame of a dick pic into a family movie. It’s not exactly like that, but that image gives you an idea. That kind of absurd, hidden history of Taiwan’s adult film screenings during the martial law period really fascinated me.

 

Before I went to San Francisco State, I had already studied film in Taiwan, but this was a kind of “dark history” — something rarely mentioned in film textbooks. That’s the part I wanted to play around with.

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Of course, my film A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady of Avengers is in conversation with Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day — that was intentional. I wanted to tell the story from Ming’s perspective, but what really interested me was the moviegoing experience itself.

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In terms of methodology, there’s a Taiwanese video artist, Su Hui-yu, who made a series called The Women's Revenge. His approach is what he calls a “reshooting project” — revisiting so-called Taiwan pulp films by literally re-performing or re-staging them. I’m definitely influenced by that, especially during my research phase.

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But for me, I’m more interested in what I mentioned earlier — the form rather than the content. So formally, my cinematic language is very different from Edward Yang’s realism — his film is four hours long, mine is ten minutes. My intention wasn’t to educate the audience or reclaim history — whether they’re Western or Taiwanese viewers, familiar with Edward Yang’s works or Giallo or not — it doesn’t matter. I’m asking: can I make a film that affects my audience before they even understand what they’re watching? What if things had been different? What if Xiao Ming did this? Like so many unfortunate Asian female characters, she is often burdened with representing suffering or sacrifice. My film simply wonders — why must she?

 

 

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CiLENS: In your video essay, you mentioned that you wanted to reimagine the ending of both Ming in Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day and the female character in Yang Chia-Yun’s The Lady Avenger. I found it fascinating that you focus on form before content, but we are also curious about the content — especially the symbolism in your film.

 

The imagery and symbolism of the watermelon are truly striking. We see this sequence of gestures and transformations at the beginning — from cutting, to squeezing, to gnawing — as the object changes from a watermelon to a bouncing basketball, to a plastic bag of juice, and finally to a blood-like dripping liquid. Later it reappears in the cinema and flashback scenes where sensuality is displayed explicitly. How do you see the interrelation of this symbolic watermelon with the themes of sensuality, desire, and murder?

 

Birdy: Yeah — you’re really good at transitioning. (laughs)

 

So my idea was… making this film felt like writing a little love letter. If you’ve watched it carefully, you can probably find all these little homages to things I love — moments from different films that I wanted to play with. I actually have a folder on my laptop full of screenshots images I knew I wanted to do something about.

 

The watermelon started from a simple idea: I wanted a water motif, and I also wanted the film to be sound-driven. So it’s not only about symbolism — I just found the watermelon really sensual. It’s red, juicy. As an ASMR fan, I could already imagine the cutting sound, the juicing sound. Like I mentioned earlier about sound waves — that was one of my goals, to experiment with how sound affects the audience physically.

 

And of course, it’s also a little homage to Tsai Ming-liang’s The Wayward Cloud. In that film, the watermelon is all about desire. It’s set in Taipei during a drought — the whole city lacks water, and the government encourages young people to drink watermelon juice instead. Meanwhile, there’s a Japanese porn actress, Lee Kang-sheng and Chen Shiang-Chyi, Tsai’s recurring actors. So the watermelon there already carries so many symbolic layers — of thirst, desire, absurdity — and that was my little nod to him.

 

It also circles back to what I mentioned earlier — the sanitized version of Taiwanese film history. Tsai is now one of the major names in the Taiwanese New Wave, along with Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang. But I wanted to touch that history playfully — not to teach or explain, but just to make a small gesture toward it.

 

And also, the color red. I talked earlier about Taiwan’s adult film screening history during martial law, and how I’m influenced by Giallo films — Dario Argento’s Deep Red in particular. When I realized Deep Red was in the public domain, I thought, “I have to use it!” (laughs) I’ve always loved horror — or rather, I learned to love it. I used to be the kind of person who walked out of horror classes, literally. But now I’m a horror fan, and I’ve learned how to mobilize horror imagery — like blood.

 

That’s still connected to the watermelon, I think. Blood is a motif that, in so many horror films, triggers what Julia Kristeva calls abject feelings. Kristeva says the abject is not an object. It’s not necessarily just one thing but a condition that reminds us of the fragility of boundaries. Why is blood scary? Because it suggests an open wound — it challenges the boundaries between what’s inside and what’s outside the body.

 

So for me, watermelon juice is both playful and provocative. It’s formal, sensual, grotesque, and excessive at the same time. It’s about boundaries being crossed — between body and image, between pleasure and discomfort.

 

But of course, that’s just my interpretation. I’m still learning from the audience. Like today, at a festival screening, someone asked, “Why a watermelon? Can it be a mango?” And I said, “Yes — it can be a fruit of your choice.” (laughs)

 

So yeah — that’s my long answer. Sorry it’s a bit lengthy, but I really enjoy talking about this.

 

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CiLENS: That’s truly fascinating! As you talked a lot about your history in learning film, and about horror films and women in horror films, we were wondering since this is your first narrative film, how do you think it will influence your later work? Would you still focus on horror and experimental forms?

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Birdy: Yeah, that’s a good question.

So, the thing is — I always wanted to be one of those cool directors who would say, “I’m working on a feature project.” But honestly, I love short films. I enjoy the format. I’m open to the idea of expanding this project into something longer, but overall, I think I really enjoy working with shorts.

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When I look back, I’ve also made a bunch of music videos for the Taiwanese band, Chthonic 閃靈樂團, which has been very political — a lot of colonial history, from the Japanese occupation to the so-called White Terror era in Taiwan. I’ve worked with them for about ten years, often with the same actors, all around the White Terror theme. So my work is very history-driven.

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I’m quite nerdy; I like reading. I’m largely inspired by what I read, and I like to play around with those ideas to create what if situations. I would say I make revenge fantasies.

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I’m really interested in women filmmakers and women film critics — like you, you work for film too, as a writer or critic, right? And as an audience member as well. Earlier I mentioned adult film history in Taiwan — one would imagine the audience was all male, and it probably was, but what’s interesting is that there wasn’t really censorship at the time, because those contents weren’t supposed to exist on screen at all. So actually, anyone could just walk in; no one was checking IDs. There were teenage audiences as well.

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So to circle back — I’m interested in why, since women filmmakers and audiences have always been there, we’re not written into history. That’s why I make revenge fantasies, to create a kind of alternate scenario that invites people to think, “Why is that? What if this happened?” That’s my passion so far.

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I’ve also been thinking about my next project. I wonder why there are no female genre filmmakers in Taiwan. I think that’s an interesting question. So I might continue exploring that through the lens of revenge fantasy, maybe playing around with Taiwanese film history or something like that. But who knows. At this point, I’m also looking for a teaching position. I’m interested in teaching because I enjoy being in a vibrant academic environment where I can talk about all kinds of nerdy stuff related to film.