The Gangster's Daughter

Shaowu, a seemingly typical teenage girl living on Taiwan's remote Kinmen Island, is briefly reunited with her estranged gangster father, Keiko (Jack Kao), at her mother's funeral. Soon after, Shaowu gets in trouble with a school bully and is sent to Taipei to live with Keiko. Shaowu's trials and tribulations negotiating adolescence against her new urban surroundings are paralleled with her father's own personal conflict: trying to go straight for his daughter's sake and start life anew. However, when his old school underground codes of honor are compromised by his cohorts' corruption and misdeeds, Keiko has no choice but to take things into his own hands and settle debts once and for all. The Gangster's Daughter blends tropes of noir and the gangster film into a bittersweet yet gritty coming-of-age drama that is thrilling, dark, and moving. (New York Asian Film Festival)