In 2014, a young man stabbed several people on a Taipei subway. He chose the stretch with the longest gap between stops, where no one could get off. His parents went to the press and begged the state to execute their son. His younger brother went to the police station, weeping, insisting there was no way his brother could have done it. When the younger brother left, he had no shoes on. He’d given them to the man everyone else had already condemned.
Nelicia Low couldn’t stop thinking about that younger brother. The film that grew out of it, Pierce, won her Best Director at Karlovy Vary. It’s built on the question he forces: how far will love go before it turns into something dangerous?
A Filmmaker Before She Knew the Word
Low knew at six or seven that she wanted to direct. That’s strange for a kid from Singapore, a country she describes as having essentially no film industry and barely more of an art tradition. The nation isn’t yet sixty years old. Movies still reached her anyway. They were a kind of out-of-body experience, a feeling of connection she chased before she had a word for it. Her classmates knew it too. When the scholarship boards came to her school with brochures for science and teaching, she picked up a science one and asked her friends what they thought. They looked at her like she was insane. You want to be a film director, they said. Film is all you talk about.
The fencing came second, not first, which surprises people. In Singapore she had to join a school club and landed in fencing. She took to it because she loved the swordplay in Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. She is blunt that most fencers picked up the blade for the same reason and would never admit it. She went on to compete for the national team and retired after the 2010 Asian Games. Then she took the long road through a London undergrad to an MFA at Columbia.
Skills You Can Teach, Soul You Cannot
Low has no patience for the easy dunk on film school. Columbia, she says, was one of the most significant stretches of her life. It was the first place she felt she belonged, full of like-minded people and professors who’d actually made things. She splits the value cleanly, though.
What Columbia gave me was not the soul, it was the skills. The soul is all you.
For two years you don’t sleep and you barely eat, she says, and the program drills skill into you without rest. What it can’t hand you is the thing that makes a filmmaker, the interior you bring yourself. That belief shapes how she works now. She insists she only has the right to open up her own life on screen, not to tell other people’s stories. So her method is to reach as deep inside herself as she can, then put what she finds in front of an audience.
The Brother at the Center
The deepest thing Low pulled from for this film is her own brother, who’s autistic. Growing up as the youngest sibling gave her a particular way of seeing it. A parent who has a disabled child meets that reality as an adult, already formed, she explains. A younger sibling is just born into it. It’s the only world you know, the normal you never think to question. She also figured out early that the bond with a sibling is the one that lasts longest, the one she’d still be carrying after her parents were gone.
All of that fed into Pierce, along with the subway killing. The film follows Zijie, a sixteen-year-old fencer played by newcomer Liu Hsiu-Fu. His older brother Zihan, played by Tsao Yu-Ning, comes home after years in juvenile prison for killing an opponent during a match. Zijie is sure his brother is innocent, and the film parks you inside that certainty, then slowly lets it curdle. Low refused to write Zihan as a flat psychopath, because nobody wants to watch or play that. Instead she and Tsao kept coming back to one line, borrowed from the British writer Jeanette Winterson.
As your lover describes you, so you are.
The idea is that the younger brother’s love and belief might genuinely move a damaged man, might briefly make him into the hero he’s seen as. It’s a curse and a gift at once. Being gaslit like that is dangerous, and yet there’s something close to heroic in the boy’s refusal to stop believing.
Sharpening It on WhatsApp
The title doubles as the method. Low cut the film for about four months on her own and got it to maybe seventy percent. Good, but not the thing she’d dreamed. She couldn’t find the right collaborator, so just before picture lock she sent it to her Columbia mentor Eric Mendelson for notes. He watched it and got so excited he told her to get on a video call. They ended up editing together for three months.
The setup was gloriously low-fi. Premiere chokes if you run it through a screen-share. So Low propped her iPhone on a dishwashing rack, aimed it at her laptop, and played the timeline back over WhatsApp while Mendelson watched from New York. He worked from six in the morning to ten, every day, and wore out his eyes doing it. One of his tweaks shows how fine the sharpening got. In a long take, the brother trains Zijie by a field with sprinklers running. The original cut showed the brother running off before vanishing. Mendelson suggested cutting back to the field earlier, so the brother doesn’t run anywhere; he simply disappears. The unease tips from realism into something dreamlike, exactly the uncertainty the film needed.
A Pattern Built for the Brothers
That instinct for precise, motivated style ran through the whole production. Low spoke with thirty cinematographers before settling on Michal Dymek, the Polish DP behind EO. She waited out a COVID postponement rather than lose him. What she prizes is invisible work. She wanted a cinematographer who knows when to pull the camera and the art direction back, so the actors and the story can come forward, and when to push them to the front, like the surreal sprinkler scene.
She and Dymek built a visual grammar around the brothers. Whenever they spoke about the river, the loaded memory at the film’s core, a specific cue would recur, evolving as the film went. For one heavy gaslighting scene she leaned on Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder and the documentary The Imposter, films that hold tight on a face until you can’t tell truth from lie.
The choice of a long lens over a wide one was deliberate. This was a personal story about a younger brother’s love, not a detective’s investigation, so the camera stayed intimate rather than clinical.
The Magnolia Stamp
The festival path closed fast for a debut. Her producers had European sales-agent contacts, but also sent Pierce to Magnify, the sales arm of Magnolia Pictures. Magnify loved it and signed on before Karlovy Vary, the reverse of the usual order. When Low opened the screener and saw the Magnolia private screening room, she figured she must have made a good film. That brand still means something, she and Marcus agree, a marker of the kind of careful, quality cinema that feels nearly endangered now.
Then the win. Best Director at one of Europe’s major festivals, for a first feature funded by a patchwork of Singaporean, Taiwanese, and Polish grants. The full conversation is worth hearing for the WhatsApp-and-dishwashing-rack edit alone. But stay for Low’s story about a documentary called Searching for Bong Joon-ho, and the brutal, honest advice the master himself gives three frightened teenagers about whether to enter this insane industry at all.
