General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Little Big Women

Little Big Women (孤味, also romanized Guo Mie, literally "lonely taste" or "solitary flavor") is a 2020 Taiwanese family drama film directed by Joseph Chen-chieh Hsu, adapted from his own 2017 short film of the same name. It stars Chen Shu-fang as Lin Shoying, a Tainan restaurant owner who, on her 70th birthday, learns that her long-estranged husband has died and that another woman, Tsai, stayed by his side until his last breath.¹^•² The film was Taiwan's highest-grossing Taiwanese film of 2020³ and won the Golden Horse Award for Best Leading Actress.⁴

Key fact	Detail
Original title	孤味 (Guo Mie), meaning roughly "lonely taste" or "solitary flavor"²
Director / writer	Joseph Chen-chieh Hsu, his debut feature, adapted from his 2017 short film⁵
Release	November 6, 2020 (Taiwan theatrical); Netflix worldwide from February 5, 2021²^•³
Box office	NT$190,860,335 in Taiwan, the highest-grossing Taiwanese film of 2020⁶^•³
Principal cast	Chen Shu-fang, Hsieh Ying-xuan, Vivian Hsu, Sun Ke-fang, Ding Ning³
Golden Horse Awards	Best Leading Actress (Chen Shu-fang); five further nominations including Best Film and Best New Director⁴^•⁵
Runtime	123 minutes⁵

Spoilers

Plot

Lin Shoying (Chen Shu-fang) is a well-known restaurant owner in Tainan, in southern Taiwan. After her husband Bo-chang left home without a word years earlier, she raised three daughters alone, building a business from a shrimp-roll street cart into a restaurant.⁷ On her 70th birthday she receives news of Bo-chang's death, and learns that another woman, Tsai (Ding Ning), stayed by him until his last breath.¹ A family reunion becomes a ten-day wake, during which Shoying arranges the funeral while trying to find out who Tsai is.¹

The three daughters carry storylines of their own. The eldest, Ching (Hsieh Ying-xuan), is an international dancer who has learned to downplay everything in her life to deal with her intrusive mother; the middle daughter, Yu (Vivian Hsu), a successful plastic surgeon in Taipei, clashes with Shoying over her own teenage daughter; the youngest, Jia-jia (Sun Ke-fang), has taken over the restaurant and fights her mother to fulfill her father's dying wish to come home.¹ The film follows Shoying's effort to overcome her grudge and accept the other woman, a theme its director described as "the process of gradually putting things to rest."³

Production and background

Origins. Director Joseph Hsu Chen-chieh, a Taiwanese native with an MFA in film production from New York University, first gained recognition with his short film Guo Mie, a 2017 Student Academy Awards finalist.⁵ The feature is adapted from that short and, according to Netflix's announcement, based on Hsu's personal experience.³ The film received the Excellent Screenplay Award from the Taiwan Film Institute in 2018 and was developed through the 2017 Golden Horse Film Project Promotion.¹

The production company was Each Other Films, with producers Jacqueline W. Liu and Tiffany Yu-chia Chen; Liao Ching-sung (The Assassin) and Vivian Hsu served as executive producers, Jon Keng (Burn) was cinematographer, and Maya Huang (End of Summer) co-wrote the screenplay.³^•⁸

Release and box office

The film received its world premiere in October 2020 at the Busan International Film Festival, screened at the Hong Kong, Busan, and Tokyo festivals, and opened in Taiwanese theaters on November 6, 2020.⁹^•⁵ It earned NT$190,860,335 in Taiwan, a sum reported as placing it at the top of the Taiwanese film box office.⁶ On January 7, 2021, Netflix announced it would exclusively stream the film worldwide, beginning February 5, 2021.³

Reception and awards

Awards. At the 57th Golden Horse Awards the film won Best Leading Actress for Chen Shu-fang, who at the time was described as the most senior actress to have won that award in Taiwan's film history.³ It received six nominations in total: Best Film, Best New Director, Best Supporting Actress (Hsieh Ying-xuan), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Film Score, and Best Original Film Song.⁵ Chen and Hsieh were both nominated at the 15th Asian Film Awards, for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress respectively.⁴

Critical response. Reviews were divided on the film's sentimentality. The New York Times critic Natalia Winkelman wrote that a gentle panning camera and a bland score milked every scene for emotion and that the film's journeys drag over more than two hours.¹⁰ Roger Moore of Movie Nation called it "a perfectly watchable genre melodrama, an old-fashioned 'women's picture.'"¹⁰ The South China Morning Post's James Marsh gave it 3.5 of 5 stars, judging Chen excellent but finding Hsieh Ying-xuan the most impressive performer as her daughter.⁹ On Douban the film held a rating of 8.0 from 103,089 users.¹¹

Themes and title

The Chinese title 孤味 refers in Taiwanese culinary culture to a chef's stubborn insistence on a unique, singular flavor, and the film uses it as a metaphor for Shoying's life of loneliness, stubborn pride, and singular dedication.² Scholars have read the film as depicting the conflict between the older generation's maternal narrative and the daughters' subjectivity, using objects such as shrimp rolls, seals, letters, and photographs to carry familial tension and foreshadow reconciliation.¹² Common Sense Media described it as a family drama spanning three generations that confronts unfaithfulness, divorce, family secrets, and money troubles, recommending it for viewers aged 13 and older.¹³

References

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