As We Like It

This novel take on the Shakespeare classic dynamically reimagines the story's gender-bending romance in the near future, with a clever conceit that should have the Bard dancing in his grave. Taipei locations are reinvented in a gloriously original avant-garde guerilla-theater style. Nonstop whimsical vignettes, not to mention a plethora of quirky characters. build an alternate universe that puts the so-called real world in illuminating perspective. A triumph for both queer and independent cinema, As We Like It's gleeful pranskterism is fun and thought-provoking, organically creating a brilliant cause celebre for Taiwan's rainbow community. (Synopsis by The New York Asian Film Festival)

Our community programmer Caitlin writes:

"I love this movie for a lot of reasons, its color and whimsy, the chemistry of the all-women cast, the depiction of a (near future!) world in which pockets of resistance to the immediacy and volume of modern information-transfer form; but primary among the reasons is the technicolor celebration of the happiness of not one, but four queer couples! In a radical break from the tropes of queer cinema, no one dies, no one is left unhappy, the world is reimagined parallel to the body's reimagining, and the happily-ever-after is a fantastical and exultant image of possibility. Taiwanese film has such a rich corpus but which is underrepresented in the United States; in a time when mainstream American conception of the island is informed almost entirely by bellicose headlines, I wanted to be able to share a representation of the people-- the artistic sensibility, the imagination, the humor-- living and loving as our Pacific neighbors."