A boy’s devotion to his uncle, a man with an intellectual disability, curdles into shame as he grows up and away from home in “Uncle,” the first feature written and directed by Taiwan’s Yen Hao-hsuan.
The project is part of the Asian Project Market, which runs within the Busan International Film Festival’s Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM).
Set in rural Taiwan from 1997 to 2000, the film follows 10-year-old Wen and A-Tsik, the uncle he is inseparable from, in a turbulent household where Wen’s grandfather runs an illegal gambling den on the ground floor. As Wen hits adolescence, his affection turns to embarrassment, while the family’s efforts to police A-Tsik’s behavior and sexuality reveal how little say he has over his own life. With the country rebuilding after an earthquake and going through its first democratic handover of power, Wen starts picturing a life beyond his hometown. When he heads off to school in the city, A-Tsik stays put.
The story is Yen’s own. He lived with his uncle for 18 years, a relationship that moved from childhood closeness to teenage shame to Yen leaving for a better future while his uncle remained unchanged. Yen kept his own life out of his short films, unsure back then whether he could separate honesty from indulgence. “Making those short films and the time that has passed since, have given me enough distance to see him as a person, not only as a relative or as a material for a film. Now I think I’m ready,” he says.
As Taiwan races toward the new millennium, its hunger for progress propels the boy forward, Yen says, while the uncle never gets that option. “I hope the film makes us think about who we leave behind, and what we fail to recognize when progress becomes the measure of a person’s worth.”
Yen also wants audiences to meet A-Tsik, and people like him, as equals. “He is loving, funny, stubborn and difficult. He has sexual desires, falls in love, makes mistakes and can hurt people,” he says. “Society labels my uncle ‘abnormal.’ I am not trying to make him ‘normal’; I just hope this film could make the gap between those two words a little smaller.”
The film is produced by Patrick Mao Huang, who founded Flash Forward Entertainment, and Sung Chin-hsuan, with Flash Forward, wpd films and Soseki Studio presenting. Huang’s credits include “Tiger Stripes,” which won the Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize in 2023, and “Deep Quiet Room.” Sung’s work spans film, series and immersive media, including 2025 Venice Immersive Grand Prize winner “The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up.”
Huang, who had long hoped to work with Yen, says the director’s shorts showed rare command of performance and sound and image, along with an honest grasp of adolescence. “To grow up is also to abandon something,” Huang says. He believes the film’s emotional core can travel beyond Taiwan.
“Uncle” is in development and financing, backed by a Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA) development grant, and was developed in the New Director Workshop held this year by the Taipei Film Festival. Yen is now writing a fresh draft and working out the film’s visual style. The project has also been picked for the Tokyo Gap-Financing Market.
In Busan, where the project is making its first Asian market outing, the producers are courting co-production partners from Korea, Japan, elsewhere in Asia and Europe, along with financiers, post-production collaborators, sales agents and distributors. Huang wants a financing and creative setup that safeguards Yen’s voice and the film’s Taiwanese character.
Yen’s 2024 short “Caged Dog” earned a Golden Horse Awards nomination in the live action short category, and his first short, 2022’s “On Another’s Sorrow,” bowed at the Golden Horse festival. He is finishing his third short, “Accident,” now in post-production, and is toying with a possible second feature or series about Taiwan’s democratization.