Documentary screening: 'Mrs. Islets'
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS Main Building
- Room
- KLT
- Event type
- Film screening
About this event
The Centre of Taiwan Studies is delighted to screen the documentary Mrs. Islets as part of this year’s Centre of Taiwan Studies Summer School, offering an intimate portrait of women’s labour, endurance, and everyday life on one of Taiwan’s most remote islands.
Set on Huayu, a small island to the west of Penghu, the film follows daily life as it moves with the rhythms of tide, season, and marine work. While men head offshore to fish, women labour along the shoreline and within the home, sustaining both household and community in ways that are often less visible. Through its close attention to a veteran forager and a local shopkeeper, the documentary opens up a quiet but powerful view of gendered labour in an island fishing society.
The film also gives audiences a wider sense of Huayu as a marginal island community shaped by isolation, ecological precarity, and demographic change. Director Chen Wei-cih, who is based in the Penghu archipelago and has worked through long-term immersion in island communities, approaches these lives with patience and care, situating women’s work within broader questions of marine environment, social reproduction, and cultural survival.
Image credit: Chen Wei-cih
About the director
Chen Wei-cih is a documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on island communities, marine environments, and everyday life in the Penghu archipelago. After moving to Penghu and spending extended periods on its offshore islets, she has documented local lives, disappearing fishing practices, and wider ecological questions connected to the sea. Her films include Twenty Minutes, Pearl Sea, Styrofoam of Adventure, Mrs. Islets, and Study Hard.
