Man Mei

Born in a rural Miaoli village during the Japanese colonial era, Man Mei’s life spans a century of Taiwan’s transformation. Drawing on family albums and declassified U.S. Second World War aerial photographs, the film traces a resilient Hakka woman’s inner world, where personal memory and historical upheaval interlace.

Caitlin ‘Sonny’ Shieh: ‘I made this film to honour my grandmother, Man Mei, and to understand the life she lived before I knew her. Born in a Miaoli farming village during the Japanese colonial era, she was a poor Hakka woman whose story was never meant to be remembered by history. But her life, spanning a century of Taiwan’s transformation, held so much I needed to know: her resilience, her struggles with mental health, the quiet weight she carried across generations.This film is both an act of remembering and an attempt to give voice to a life rarely centred: the interior world of a woman like my grandmother, whose experiences of imperialism, war, gendered exploitation, and survival were lived intimately, not historically. In making this film, I wanted to hold space for her memory, to sit with what she endured and what she gave.’