Article by Elisabetta Pala
Translation by Chiara Ventura
«How great is it to be white?». It is Joan Huang the one who has to answer this question in Slanted, presented at the 43rd TFF. Once she moved with her parents to the south of the USA, Joan began to be bullied for her Chinese origins until she became a teenager and decided to undergo plastic surgery to obtain the appearance of a young Caucasian girl.
Slanted is the feature film debut for Amy Wang, a Chinese-Australian director and screenwriter who, inspired by her own immigrant experience, conceived the idea for the movie following the hostile rhetoric towards China during the Covid-19 pandemic and after the killing of innocent Asian women during Atlanta’s shootings of 2021. Detaching from these events, Wang chooses to direct a satirical teen movie with an all-female cast. References to a classic like Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004) are particularly evident in the high school scenes, where –also here– three “barbies” (in Waters’ movie the term originally used is “Plastics” for a reason) are obsessed with becoming the next prom queen.
Despite a rarefied atmosphere and a fairytale-like soundtrack, Wang provocatively continues her foray into body horror: she admitted that The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024) was the main inspiration for her directorial debut, especially regarding the theme of the double and of the split personality depicted on screen –initially it is Shirley Chen who plays the protagonist, a role that is then passed on to Mckenna Grace. Joan Huang takes a new identity becoming Jo Hunt, her own opposite version, surgically modified and consequently unstable.
Article published in “La Repubblica Torino” on November 26 2025.