WILD GRASS
SHAN WU
2021
SHAN WU (Writer, Director, and Producer) is a Los Angeles-based Taiwanese independent filmmaker and multi-disciplinary artist. Her script Wild Grass won the Tim Disney Prize for Excellence in Storytelling. Her film Lookover was selected for Formosa Festival of International Filmmaker, Supernova Digital Animation Festival, and CINMARE International Ocean Film Festival. Her video installation work Bardo won the Bronze Medal at the National Art Exhibition in New Media Art in 2018 and was shown in the National Taiwan Museum. In 2017, she collaborated with Santa Paula Art Museum on a site-specific project called Mural, which was projected on the facade of the Cole Creativity Center. She is one of the founders of Taiwan Video Club, a collaborative screening of Taiwanese films, and served as a Senior Programmer at the Los Angeles Chinese Film Festival in 2019. Shan is a graduate from the California Institute of the Arts' Film and Video and Integrated Media Program.
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SYNOPSIS :
A Taiwanese woman’s journey to America reveals her fantasy of love and an identity entangled with beauty, sexuality, nationality and two languages. Through the protagonist confronting her own image and her failure at communicating, WILD GRASS tells an unusual love story that is deceptive yet revealing.
We never hear from the woman on the screen nor the narrator. As the correlation and mismatch between the image and the text become more unstable, the veracity of both the image and words comes into question. The woman’s struggle with her inner self plays out as she runs over and over again in an imaginary landscape— where her memory of water and sound from Taiwan is laid over yellow wild grass.