Category: Musical drama
Directed by: Gavin Lin
Similar to: Glee, but in a prison.
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Regular readers and the bots that scrape this website will know that foreign language movies aren't really my thing - out of the 70 or so movies I've reviewed so far, only a handful have been foreign. Not out of hatred or anything, but just that one tends to feel more comfortable with the things they're familiar with.
However, I can now add another foreign movie to the list - Sunshine Women's Choir, which marks my first Chinese-language movie. My wife wanted to see this since it had quite a bit of hype from its release in Taiwan, and look, discounted movie tickets and a night out with the family aren't the worst combination in history.
When I was told that we're seeing Sunshine Women's Choir, I initially thought it was about the Melbourne suburb of Sunshine - and yes, there is literally a suburb in Melbourne called Sunshine, named after the company that built a manufacturing hub in the suburb around WW1. A movie about a group of women from a working-class immigrant suburb forming a choir wouldn't have been a bad premise for a movie, but it turns out this movie is about a bunch of women in a prison who form a choir instead.
Let's get reviewing, shall we!
Plot (really badly explained):
Inside the northern women's prison of Taiwan (implying there's also a southern women's prison in Taiwan), the pregnant Hui-Zhen (Ivy Chen) gives birth and raises her daughter. In her cell (which looks more like a creche than a place where people do hard times) are three other women who help raise the girl - the more senior Yu Ying (Judy Ongg), the middle-aged Pei Ying (May Suen) who has a male pen pal/love interest on the outside, and Xiu Lan (Amber An).
