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The characters at the center of "Left-Handed Girl" are like individual stations of the cross on a long road to womanhood. Little I-Jing, for example. I-Jing is 5 years old, and when we meet her she is moving to the Taiwanese capital of Taipei with her mother and older sister. I-Jing's face is like a sun and a moon at once, open and hopeful, and everything she sees is beautiful. "Mom!" she shouts as her mother, behind the wheel of a packed moving truck, steers them into the new city. "It's amazing!"

I-Jing's mother, Shu-Fen, might retain a memory of once having her daughter's wide-eyed engagement with the world, but it's distant now, and growing more so. Her other child, I-Ann, a sullen teen, is caught in the no-girl's land between childhood and the world of grownups -- which, as she can see from observing her mother's life, is a place of hard compromises and unfulfilled promises. What is to become of these three?

"Left-Handed Girl" is a first full feature from Shih-Ching Tsou, a Taiwanese native who began her journey into filmmaking more than 20 years ago at New York University. There she met a young aspiring writer-director named Sean Baker, who earlier this year won four Oscars for his rousingly original 2024 film "Anora." Baker and Tsou have been on-and-off collaborators ever since those college days, with Tsou intermittently signing on to work as Baker's cowriter, producer, editor, costume designer and sometime actor. Now Baker is onboard as cowriter and editor on Tsou's first solo outing, which has already been widely praised and has just been posted on Netflix (dubbed with unusual care from Mandarin into English). It has also been selected as Taiwan's entry for Best International Feature at this year's Academy Awards.

Given Baker and Tsou's long association, it's no surprise that "Left-Handed Girl" bears a marked resemblance to Baker's work -- especially his 2017 film "The Florida Project." Unlike that picture, though, which told its story largely through a close-up focus on the lives of children living in the scrub and glare of Disney World, "Left-Handed Girl" pulls back from the little family at its core to more fully examine other aspects of the tale. We get a bigger picture: a dying husband, a contraband-smuggling grandmother, various denizens of Taipei's bustling night market.

The market is where the girls' mother, Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai), rents a stall to cook and sell noodles in order to keep her brood afloat. I-Jing (the ridiculously cute Nina Ye) assists her as a sort of mini-waitress. The older daughter, I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma), has branched out to work in a betel nut stall, catering to nightbirds in search of buzz.

The night market is full of lessons to be learned: for I-Ann, about the difficulties of dealing with heedless male lust; for Shu-Fen, about reclaiming a sense of her own value after abandonment by her husband. Meanwhile, little I-Jing, who is left-handed, is learning a cruel lesson from her grandfather (Akio Chen), who passes on to her the traditional Chinese belief that the left hand does the Devil's work, and that in times long past she would have been executed for her regrettable condition. This antique nonsense has the unexpected effect of launching a giddy moppet crime wave, which might have been a more gratifying conclusion for the movie than the melodramatic muddle into which it finally wanders.

Still, the picture is a memorable calling card for director Tsou, and the three women who carry it give impressive performances. The movie captures the unfamiliar flavors of Taipei -- the nasal growl of cruising scooters, the zing and ping of all-night arcade games -- in a bracingly raw light. (It was shot on iPhones, much like Baker's celebrated 2015 feature, "Tangerine.") There are also unexpected little shivers in the dialogue, as when the happy, hopeful I-Jing tells her sister, "I'm still young," and I-Ann replies, "Not for long."

To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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