Shih-Ching Tsou and Sean Baker’s film about a struggling family in Taiwan

In 2001, Shih-Ching Tsou and Sean Baker were scouting Taiwan to brainstorm ideas for a film they could direct together. Daunted by the possibilities, the pair instead co-wrote and co-directed Take Out, a 2004 indie set in their hometown of New York. Revisiting Taipei in 2010, they came across a five-year-old girl running through a night market. The image was instantly cinematic.

“She ran around so freely,” says Tsou, the director and co-writer of Left-Handed Girl. “We followed her back to her mother.”

“We wanted a young girl who grew up in night markets, but we didn’t know whether she really existed or not,” says Baker, the co-writer and editor of Left-Handed Girl. “When we came across a girl who was literally I-Jing, we said, ‘OK, this is realistic.’ It gave us confidence to write the screenplay.”

Tsou and Baker, who met in 1999 as students at The New School in New York, based their script for Left-Handed Girl on the aforementioned girl in the night market. However, by the time the film was greenlit, the free-spirited five-year-old was a grown adult. During that period, Tsou was a producer on four films directed by Baker (Starlet, Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket). When Baker started production on Anora, Tsou was in Taipei shooting Left-Handed Girl as a solo director.

At the London Film Festival, I meet the pair at Corinthia Hotel, greeting them with my left hand. For Baker, it’s seven months after he concluded an exhausting awards campaign that led to Anora winning five Oscars, including Best Picture. “It’s a different vibe,” he says with a grin. “I’m here to celebrate Shih-Ching’s film.”

Already announced as Taiwan’s Oscar submission for 2026, Left-Handed Girl follows five-year-old I-Ying (Nina Ye) and her older sister I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma, a first-timer discovered on Instagram) as they are relocated by their mother, Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai), to Taipei, a city where the buzzing night markets offer the chance for reinvention. A heartfelt crowdpleaser with laugh-out-loud set-pieces, it boasts the madcap energy of Tangerine, the grittiness of Take Out, and the dark humour of Anora. Gradually revealing each character’s wants and needs, it’s what the duo refer to as “Mike Leigh-ish” – they cite Secrets & Lies as the main inspiration.

The title comes from I-Ying stunning her conservative grandfather by eating with her left hand. Informed that it’s “the Devil’s hand”, I-Ying trains herself to use her right hand. The girl thus convinces herself of a loophole: she can’t be blamed for anything to do with her left appendage. It leads to shoplifting (with the left hand, of course) and a terrifying moment when she considers severing her left limb off from the wrist with a kitchen knife.

Growing up in Taiwan, Tsou was also born left-handed and, under pressure from her grandfather, converted to primarily using her right hand. In the years leading up to the shoot, Tsou’s friends in Taiwan warned her that left-handed corrections were a thing of the past. “I told them, ‘It’s my story, and I’m going to make my story,’” says Tsou. “Then when I cast Nina in 2022, the mother told me that Nina was born left-handed and they corrected it because of her grandmother.”

“See, it’s still happening!” says Baker, laughing.

“We had to train Nina to use her left hand again,” says Tsou. “Every time we cut, we’d be like, ‘Which hand did she use?’”

While Left-Handed Girl is in Mandarin, the duo wrote the screenplay in English, with Baker typing it up in Final Draft. To apply for a government fund, Tsou translated the script into Chinese. Over the years, the pair would update the script.

I just fell in love with Taiwan immediately. It’s not just the night markets. It’s the binlang stands, the dance hall, the extravagant karaoke rooms

“The subplot with the grandmother being part of a trafficking ring, that was based on real events,” says Baker. “We wanted to mirror reality.”

Shot for $3,000 on a DV camera, Take Out captured New York’s melting-pot culture through its non-actors, real locations, and cinéma vérité aesthetic. Several scenes are simply a Chinese deliveryman cycling through Manhattan. (They once considered shooting Left-Handed Girl in East Chinatown.) With a larger budget, Left-Handed Girl does something similar with Taipei, especially when I-Jing sprints past stalls (the camera lowers to her height), or I-Ann’s arc as a “binlang girl” – the term for a provocatively dressed woman who sells betel nuts and cigarettes – sleeping with her sleazy boss.

To capture the vibrancy of the night markets, Tsou shot the film on an iPhone. “If you set up a huge camera, everyone will want to know what you’re doing,” says Tsou. “With an iPhone, we could follow a little girl in a crowded space.”

“If you’re shooting digital, there’s no reason not to shoot on an iPhone,” adds Baker. “They’re getting better every day. We shot Tangerine on the iPhone 5s on HD, and Shih-Ching shot this on the [iPhone] 13 in 4K.”

“In the beginning, in the car, there was nowhere to put a cameraman amongst the cast,” says Tsou. “So we taped a phone onto the window.”

“Oh, that’s how you did it?” says Baker. “The movie has so much movement. That was made possible by iPhones.”

The kinetic energy is also derived through Baker’s cutting. He claims that editing a Mandarin-language film isn’t as hard as it sounds: he did it on Take Out, and also handled the Russian and Armenian dialogue on Anora. “I get all the dailies subtitled, and then it’s making choices off of the emotion,” he explains. “You’re judging a performance from the physicality and inflection. You don’t need to know the language.”

Baker describes the hardest part of editing Left-Handed Girl as ensuring it plays differently on a second viewing. You’ll understand why when the credits roll – I can confirm that a rewatch is like experiencing a new film. It also has, I notice, a vomiting scene, just like every other Baker-related film.

“We knew that [a character throwing up] would be a tradition [in Baker’s films] from very early on,” says Tsou. “The only thing that changed is that Gogo was originally a monkey.”

I-Jing’s pet meerkat was meant to be a monkey?

“I had a pet monkey when I was young,” says Tsou. “But we needed a special performance license, because it’s a protected animal.”

“She called me from Taipei, and said, ‘We can’t get the monkey,’” says Baker. “I was heartbroken. Then she goes, ‘No, don’t worry, I’m going to go with a meerkat instead.’ I thought, ‘That’s good. Besides Life of Pi, I’ve never seen a meerkat in a film. And, by the way, this meerkat is touring film festivals and screenings in Taiwan.”

“The meerkat’s coming to our premiere,” says Tsou. “He’s so cute.”

Tsou believes that I-Ying’s exhilaration from witnessing the night markets as a five-year-old girl is paralleling Baker’s reaction to Taipei. “That’s why the film is so special to audiences, especially westerners,” she says. “It’s like it’s seen through a white guy’s eyes!” She laughs. “The [local Taiwanese] cinematographers didn’t do the colour correction process with us. When they first saw the film at Cannes, they were like, ‘Oh, that’s how foreign people look at Taiwan.’ They saw the film through Sean’s eyes.”

“I just fell in love with Taiwan immediately,” says Baker. “It’s not just the night markets. It’s the binlang stands, the dance hall, the extravagant karaoke rooms. It was all about embracing the cultural specificity, and celebrating it.”

Tsou speaks proudly of learning that Nina Ye continued using her left hand after the shoot. Upon learning of the movie’s existence, the actor’s grandmother decided to be more lenient. “So now Nina’s got her left hand back,” says Tsou. “It’s wonderful. We have to get rid of this outdated tradition. You should be able to be who you are. It’s important for people to understand this message.”

Left-Handed Girl is out now in cinemas and on Netflix.