A friendship can make another life seem possible. Shu Qi’s Girl follows a young person growing up in Taiwan in 1988 whose encounter with a more carefree girl unsettles the limits of her own world. Her mother’s past complicates that opening. The Malaysia International Film Festival’s synopsis introduces a story about inherited sorrow and the wish for freedom. Begin with the festival’s introduction to the film.
For Shu Qi, long known as an actor, the film also marked a move into directing a feature. In her statement for the 2025 Venice Film Festival, she described how serving on festival juries had helped prompt her to write. The Venice page offers her own account of that transition alongside the film’s synopsis and credits. These materials introduce the work; this article is not a review based on watching it. Explore the filmmaker’s statement.
In July 2026, the film encountered a barrier to reaching a Malaysian festival audience. Screen International reported that public screenings of Girl and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev were canceled after the films could not obtain local approval without cuts to sexual content. Festival founder Joanne Goh presented the decision as an effort to preserve the films’ artistic integrity while complying with local requirements. Screen’s July 15 report.
The distinction between cancellation and exclusion matters here. Screen reported that Girl remained eligible for the festival’s competition even though its public screenings were canceled. The festival’s own film page continues to classify it as a competition title. Recognition by a jury and access for an audience are different opportunities; one can survive while the other disappears.
A third film mentioned in Screen’s report, Wang Yang’s June, faced a different obstacle: a Chinese screening permit had not arrived in time. It would be misleading to fold that account into the same demand for Malaysian cuts. Similar outcomes on a festival schedule can arise through different decisions and requirements.
We have not obtained the Malaysian classification decision or a list of the proposed edits. The reporting therefore supports a bounded account of these festival screenings, not a claim that the film was prohibited everywhere or that every later route to it was closed. It also leaves room to ask how the filmmakers understood the conditions and the festival’s response.
There is a difficult choice inside the decision to cancel rather than cut. Keeping a work intact protects something the organizers consider essential; the local audience nevertheless loses its chance to encounter that version. Neither consequence erases the other. Following both makes the story more useful than treating the presence of a title in a program as the whole measure of access.
A question to carry forward: What does a festival owe a film and its audience when the version it wants to present is not the version it is permitted to screen?
Have a correction, additional evidence, or a response to this story? Write to the editor. Please include the article title and relevant sources.