Small Talk (2016)

Small Talk (2016)

Directed by: Hui-chen Huang

Presented by: Rosalyne Sheih (A+U, Faculty), Marianna Gonzalez-Cervantes (SMArchS)

Part of the Spring 2021 Cinema and Architectural Imagination series

Join the Zoom discussion on April 21, 2021 at 6 PM EST

About the film:

As was customary in Taiwan in the 1970s, Anu was married off at a young age. After having two children, Anu divorced her violent husband and raised her daughter alone. Since then, her only romantic relationships have been with women who, like her, earn a living as professional mourners at funerals. It’s considered taboo in Taiwanese culture to question a mother’s love, but that’s exactly the topic of her daughter, Hui-chen Huang’s, intimate portrait. Mother and daughter setoff on a journey together into the past, during which Hui-chen confronts Anu with questions that have tormented Hui-chen for many years. In doing so she paints a picture of the changing lives and conditions for three generations of women in Taiwan (Text via the Film Collaborative).

About the presenters:

Rosalyne Shieh is an architect and educator. As the Marion Mahony Emerging Practice Fellow at MIT, she teaches design studios, workshops and seminars, and advises thesis. She is part of a collaborative architecture practice SCHAUM/SHIEH, with offices in Houston and New York City. Her writing has been published in Log, Pidgin, and Paprika. Her current research looks at place at the intersection of material culture, oral history, and postcolonial identity in Taiwan. Previously, Rosalyne taught at the Yale School of Architecture, The Cooper Union, and the University of Michigan, where she was the 2009-2010 Taubman Fellow in Architecture. She is a MacDowell Fellow, recipient of the AIA Henry Adams Certificate, and holds degrees from Berkeley, the Bartlett, and Princeton.

Marianna Gonzalez-Cervantes is currently a SMarchS Architectural Design student at MIT. Originally from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, her Master's thesis at the GSD focused on edges in which things are and are not (architecture) and the thickness in which they become one or the other where the US / MX border, an edge in itself, was chosen as a site. As a result, she currently finds herself interested in designing and making large scale objects - not buildings - as a way of practicing architecture.

Learn more about the Spring 2021 Cinema and Architectural Imagination Series

Above image: Film Poster, "Small Talk," directed by Hui-chen Huang (2016)