General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Apolitical Romance

Apolitical Romance (對面的女孩殺過來) is a 2012 Taiwanese romantic comedy directed by Hsieh Chun-yi (謝駿毅), in which a blunt young woman from Beijing travels to Taiwan to find her grandmother's first love and strikes a deal with a Taiwanese civil servant who needs her help writing a cross-strait etiquette report.¹ The film stars Huang Lu (黃璐) as Qin Lang and Bryan Chang (張書豪) as A-Zheng, and it was screened at the 2012 Golden Horse Film Festival before its Taiwanese theatrical release on September 27, 2013.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	對面的女孩殺過來; earlier working title 水饺几两 ("A Few Liang of Dumplings")⁴
Director / writers	Hsieh Chun-yi's first feature; written by Lyra Fu (傅凱羚), Hsieh Chun-yi, and Zhu Yi (朱宜)³^•⁵
Leads	Huang Lu as Qin Lang (秦朗), Bryan Chang as A-Zheng (阿正)⁶
Supervisor	Yee Chin-yen (易智言), director of Blue Gate Crossing³
Festival and release	Golden Horse Film Festival screening November 13, 2012; Taiwan release September 27, 2013; 90 minutes²^•³
Languages	Mandarin and Taiwanese (Hokkien), with English subtitles at festival screenings⁷
Overseas box office	Singapore release July 24, 2014, one theater, $9,083 gross⁸

Spoilers

Plot

Qin Lang, a fiery young woman from Beijing, arrives in Taiwan alone to find her grandmother's first love, a man named Chen Guang who came to Taiwan about 60 years earlier as a soldier; the only clue she carries is his name.¹^•⁹ A-Zheng, a civil servant in the Taipei city government, has had ten drafts of his "Cross-Strait Etiquette" report rejected and faces demotion.¹ The two meet at a dumpling shop and make an exchange: she helps him write a report his supervisor will accept, and he uses his position to help her search for Chen Guang.⁶^•¹⁰

Their search takes them across the island, and the journey doubles as a tour of Taiwan: the film sends the pair to Pingxi Station for a sky-lantern scene that serves both the old lover's storyline and the sightseeing format.¹¹ Along the way they encounter a gangster, an elderly man with Alzheimer's disease cared for by a much younger wife, and other candidates for the identity of Chen Guang; the search also prompts A-Zheng to reconnect with his own estranged father.⁵ As the bickering pair gradually shed their prejudices about each other, a romance grows, and the film ends with an open, airport-set finale.⁶^•⁷

Cross-strait comedy

The film's humor runs on the cultural and political friction between its two leads. Qin Lang repeatedly calls Taiwan a "province" and speaks of "unification," while A-Zheng defends Taiwan's customs, teaches her Hokkien, and introduces her to local food; in one noted scene she sings a patriotic song at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall.⁷^•⁵ The English title, Apolitical Romance, is itself a joke the critics enjoyed unpacking: as the reviewer Lan Zu-wei observed, choosing the word "apolitical" already shows how much political calculation went into the script, which keeps politics at a teasing, comic distance rather than removing them.¹¹

Director Hsieh said he wanted to treat cross-strait subject matter in a lighter register than earlier films, which had focused on historical ties and the emotions of older generations; he wanted to show how people in their twenties and thirties actually talk about the relationship, and he deliberately wrote the romance as an ambiguity, mirroring the cross-strait situation itself.¹² A recurring comic set piece concerns A-Zheng's collection of Gundam model kits, which Qin Lang dismisses as dolls, forcing him to defend a hobby that carries different meanings on the two sides.¹¹

Production

Hsieh Chun-yi studied at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts Asia campus in Singapore, and the film was his graduation production; he returned to Taiwan in 2011 to shoot it.⁴ His earlier short film Braid (辮子) had won a Directors Guild of America student filmmaking award.¹² The producer Gu Qiao, a schoolmate from the same program, came from mainland China.⁴ Huang Lu, known until then for grim dramatic roles in films such as Blind Mountain, described the comedic, sharp-tongued Qin Lang as the most difficult role she had played.⁴

The title went through roughly two hundred candidates. The original title, 水饺几两 ("A Few Liang of Dumplings"), confused audiences about the film's genre, so Hsieh and the distributor changed it; the final title, 對面的女孩殺過來 (literally "The Girl Across Comes Charging Over"), came from an early offhand idea inspired by Richie Ren's hit song 對面的女孩看過來 ("The Girl Over There, Look Over").⁴^•¹³ In interviews Hsieh explained that the script originally considered four different fates for the old man Chen Guang, including death and Alzheimer's disease, before settling on the first-love storyline as the one best suited to a comedy.⁴

Release and reception

The film screened as a Golden Horse Film Festival selection in November 2012 and competed at the 2013 Taipei Film Awards.²^•³ It opened in Taiwanese theaters on September 27, 2013.³ Its New York premiere came at the 13th New York Asian Film Festival in July 2014, where the program described the leads' chemistry as "excellent, unforced" and noted that politics stay "never far below the surface, though always in a light, easy way."⁷ The film also played the 2014 Fukuoka International Film Festival in Japan under the title ロマンス狂想曲.¹³

Commercially the film traveled modestly: Box Office Mojo records a single-theater release in Singapore on July 24, 2014, distributed by Cathay-Keris Films, with a total gross of $9,083.⁸ Reviewers in Taiwan and abroad consistently read the film as a light comedy wrapped around a serious subject, with the older generation's history of separation carried by the grandmother's story and set down, in the words of one promotional account, by the younger generation.¹⁰

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 2011 to 2012 › Released in 2012

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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