Karlovy Vary 2024: Pierce (Best Director Award) | Interview of Nelicia Low
In Pierce, relationships are difficult to handle when love veils everything. We met director Nelicia Low, who won the Best Director Award at Karlovy Vary 2024.
Pierce is an exciting name for a film; at first, it makes you wonder if it is about a person. However, as the film develops, the meaning of its title becomes much more appropriate and helps in understanding the tensions and heartaches that the characters go through. This is writer-director Nelicia Low’s stylish film about two brothers whose strong bond is put to the test due to unclear intentions.
Low states, “The Mandarin title, 刺心切骨, means to pierce your heart and cut your bone… it’s a metaphor. It means great emotional pain.” She adds, “This film is also about love and how it can really hurt you a lot of the time when you love blindly. So, in answer to your question about what love means, and did I find the answer when I was making the film? I think, in a way, I did. Hence, this film is a very personal story.”
Low describes how she ended up in Taiwan by fate. “I was at Columbia, and my senior was Taiwanese. She asked me to go over, so I just sort of ended up there. And then, when I was making my first short film there in 2014, that’s when there were a lot of policemen on the subway. My producer then told me that it was because an incident had happened a month earlier, where this guy stabbed a lot of people on the subway. His parents begged the government to execute their son so he could be reborn as a better person in the next life. But his younger brother went to the station, crying, and gave his shoes to the brother, saying there was no way he could have done this. So, because that was the incident that inspired Pierce, I couldn’t imagine setting it anywhere else after that.
Low goes on to explain that this film is about her brother. In a way, this film is her way of healing her pain. “I think you can only make a film when you’ve healed a wound in your heart. And my wound with him is a childhood one.”
Low opens up about how it’s very conventional to say that it’s healthy not to love people blindly. “You must always know who they are. But you never really know who people are, even though in my case, it’s very extreme. It’s always a love-hate relationship in a family. So, how do you define that in Pierce? Here, it’s like the mother has gone to the extreme, saying that she doesn’t know the son anymore or she lies about the son,” said Low.
In Low’s film, this unconditional love is not between parent and child as it is often commonly perceived, but it’s more between the siblings. This feeling that she has expressed comes from her own childhood experience.
“When I was young, there’s something that you realize when you have a sibling that needs taking care of, which is that you are the caretaker for the rest of your life. And that makes you think about things that people don’t usually think about so much, which is that, in fact, the parent-child relationship is not as long as the sibling relationship. In fact, it’s not on the same plane either. Your parent is already an adult. You’re a kid. Whereas with a sibling, you grow up together. And if you’re lucky, you spend the rest of your lives together. So because of my relationship with my brother, I knew that from a very young age. So that’s why in the film, the sibling relationship is the one that is about love because that is the truth for me.”
She further adds that in terms of the mother’s character, she has a lot of love for her younger son. “She’s someone who comes with a lot of trauma. She’s an adult. She gave birth to one son. She has no idea how to deal with it. And now she has another son that is in grave danger every single day, every second, because of her older son. So, I don’t believe that she doesn’t have love for her older son. I think she just doesn’t know how to deal with it.”
Her sophisticated, sleek film has added enhancing moments when she chose fencing as her trope to tell the story of sibling love. “When I was a fencer, I happened to be in very close contact with my Taiwanese competitors… I mean, I guess we were opponents in the past, but now they’re all coaches, and the entire Taiwanese fencing community really came together and helped me on this film because fencing is such a rare sport,” said Low.
Low also brought in her expertise in the sport when there was a period of two weeks when they were in between coaches, and she had to take over. “This was difficult for me because I hadn’t picked up my fencing sword since the Asian Games 2010. So yeah, I had to train them for a little bit, but I really let the coaches take over as much as possible,” she adds.
Low also gives insight into the various ways to love, showcasing three relationships during the film. The relationship between the brothers is obviously something that’s very manipulative. “It can be called unhealthy because you never know whether one is lying or telling the truth. The relationship between the mother and her boyfriend is also, in a way, based on a lie, right? Because she’s lying about her older son. And in a funny way, between the main protagonist Zhi Jie and Jing Hui, the love interest, it was, for me, really the antithesis to him and his brother.”
There’s always a moment when you discover something about someone you’ve known forever, and you had no clue. Just because something is based on a lie doesn’t mean your love for them isn’t real. That was the premise when I started writing this script. I wrote it with the ending first, and then I spent five years figuring out why he does it.”
Speaking about relationships, Low gives a glimpse into her personal relationship with her autistic brother. “He sees me as the bane of his existence now because without me in his life, he has a very easy life. He was in the audience at the premiere. I actually chose the songs “Oh Carol” and “You Mean Everything to Me” because he likes those songs. I knew he wouldn’t understand. I’m a caretaker, and I’ll be one for the rest of my life. But for me, making the movie has affirmed this.
Low states that the whole film is like a dream in a way. It’s his dream of the brother. And a lot of the artistic and directorial choices were made to look like a dream. In the end, I really wanted to leave the ending open to interpretation. You know, you could think it’s real, or you could think it’s all happening in the younger brother’s head. It’s what he wishes he could have done. I also wanted to leave this up to people’s interpretation. I think if you’re a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty person, that’s how you’ll see the film.
Low is already working on her next project, another personal story, this time about the love for art between a father and his daughter. “It’s about a choice. It’s about Cantonese opera set in the States. And it’s about a girl. In the past, it was either all male or female tropes. So, she can choose to be a Cantonese opera singer and lead a life of hell as an artist. Or she can be the successor to her father’s Chinese American bank. But I will let my film tell you what happens next,” concludes Low.
We were delighted to be covering the 58th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival on the ground. Explore our coverage here.
