Who’ll Stop the Rain

“Everyone is like a new canvas that can be painted in different colours.” So speaks art student Chi-wei, who is about to enter a turbulent phase of her young life in which all matters of politics, sexuality and creativity are open to question. Su I-hsuan’s film revisits the memory of a prolonged strike at a Taiwanese art school in the 1990s, in which the students protested the cause of 'creative freedom' in the face of patriarchal authority figures who insisted on conformism and conventionality. Worse still, the art history curriculum is entirely Westernised and Taiwanese art is accorded no value. This is a system seemingly impervious to the waves of social change that began earlier, like the 1990 Wild Lily student movement.

Who’ll Stop the Rain is above all a stirring love story. Gentle and moving in the way it portrays how we come to our feelings and a consciousness for what matters, and how we discover that happiness is a thing to be taken seriously. Through all the moral and social issues raised by unfolding events, the queer romance of Ching and Chi-wei reverberates in its intensity.

– Adrian Martin