Golden Horse Film Project Promotion
Selected Project
Golden Horse FPP 2024

Mama! Off The Road

媽媽!看你往哪跑!

Narrative Feature Vancouver · Banff Hokkien · Mandarin · English In Development
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Logline

A faded actress takes a role in her daughter's queer road movie — only to realize the accepting mother she's playing is the very mother her daughter never had.

一個過氣女演員出演導演女兒的同志公路電影,卻發現自己扮演的那個母親,正是女兒這輩子從未擁有過的那個媽媽。

Synopsis

One film, to translate
twenty years of silence

Once a household name, Xiao Suhua is now offered only mothers. When her daughter Chen Ao — an independent director who has mortgaged everything — needs a mother for her crowd-funded rainbow road movie, an old estrangement is forced back into a single film crew.

The camera travels north, from Vancouver to Banff. On screen she plays a mother learning to embrace her queer daughter; off screen, she never has. As making a film becomes re-living a life, art and reality begin to devour one another — and the road home turns out far longer than the script.

The film we are watching
is the film she is making.

The Theme

Between an Asian mother and daughter: I love you, but I won't say it. For your own good, I hurt you. I want to be close, so I try to control.

The Characters

Four people, one road folded away for twenty-five years

No villains — only people who loved the wrong way.

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Lead · Faded Screen Legend

Xiao Suhua

肖素華

Once beloved across the country, now offered nothing but supporting mothers. To prove the industry still needs her, she walks onto her daughter's set — to play a mother she never learned to be in real life. Proud, sharp-tongued, image-obsessed; underneath, simply terrified of being forgotten by her own child.

39
Lead · Director · The Daughter

Chen Ao

陳傲

An independent writer-director who has bet everything on this film. She wants to be understood, not judged. Defense is her armor — work talk only, unanswered calls, cold silence. With an entire film, she is asking her mother a question she has never dared say out loud.

32
Actress · Chen Ao's Girlfriend

Lin Jing

林靜

Pink-haired, she plays the girlfriend "Rebecca" on screen — and is Chen Ao's partner off screen. She longs for a future with certainty: marriage, children, being safely held. Chen Ao's walls keep making her feel like someone kept hidden.

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Rising Star · Lead of the Film-within

Aka

當紅演員

She grew up on Xiao Suhua's films — "If she's in, I'm in." One promise ignites the crowdfunding and chains mother and daughter to the same bus. The sunshine of the set — and where the undercurrents begin.

Recognition

Golden Horse Film Project Promotion

Selected Project
Golden Horse FPP 2024

2024 金馬創投會議入選作品

Mama! Off The Road was selected for the 2024 Golden Horse Film Project Promotion (Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival), meeting international producers, financiers and distributors as development continues.

Golden Horse FPP meetings, Taipei 2024
Golden Horse FPP · Taipei, 2024

Made By

A team across the Pacific

Director · Writer · Producer
Dandelion Lin林思新
Script Consultant
Ji Xiao姬驍
Co-Producer
Lin Boyu林博宇
Production
Dandelion Lin Pictures林氏影業

Dandelion (Sixin) Lin林思新 — Director · Producer

"My camera is a scalpel, dissecting the fragile relationship between individual existence and the collective world."

A Los Angeles–based director and producer, trained in oil painting at the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts. Moving from canvas to screen, his work keeps dissecting the fragile bond between the individual and the world — always asking: have I made this world more tender, more merciful?

Past Works ↗
Narrative Feature Golden Horse FPP 2024 · Selected Vancouver · Banff Hokkien · Mandarin · English Film-within-a-film In Development

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