General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Untold Herstory (流麻沟十五号)

Untold Herstory (流麻溝十五號) is a 2022 Taiwanese historical drama film directed by Zero Chou (周美玲) that depicts female political prisoners held for "thought re-education" on Green Island during Taiwan's White Terror in the 1950s.¹ Its title is the shared registered household address assigned to the women imprisoned there, who were managed by number rather than name.²

Key fact	Detail
Director / screenwriters	Zero Chou (周美玲); screenplay by Chou and 吳旻炫³
Source	Oral history collection 流麻溝十五號：綠島女生分隊及其他 by Tsao Chin-jung (曹欽榮), published by the Cheng Nan-jung Foundation in 2002⁴
Setting	1953, the 新生訓導處 re-education camp on Green Island, under the White Terror⁵
Cast	余佩真, 連俞涵, 徐麗雯, 徐韜, 莊岳³
Release	28 October 2022 in Taiwan; 112 minutes; Mandarin, Taiwanese, Japanese, and indigenous languages⁶^•⁵
Production	thuànn Taiwan Film Corporation (湠台灣電影), executive producer Yao Wen-chih (姚文智), a former legislator turned film producer³^•¹
Recognition	Nominated for Best Original Film Song ("永遠的所在" by 曹雅雯) at the 59th Golden Horse Awards; 23rd Taipei Film Award for Best Film Marketing; selected in the Harbour competition section of the Rotterdam festival⁷

Spoilers

Plot and characters

The story follows three women of different ages and backgrounds who are sent to the camp: the student 余杏惠 (杏子), arrested after drawing posters for a student association and accused of being a communist spy; the dancer 陳萍, who gains privileges through the camp's battalion commander while trying to reunite with her sister in Taiwan; and the young mother and nurse 嚴水霞, a Christian who maintains her convictions and organizes a "non-cooperation movement," secretly circulating banned newspapers.¹^•⁵

The plot's central crisis comes when the camp authorities launch the "一人一事良心救國運動" (One Person, One Thing Conscience Save-the-Nation Movement), demanding that prisoners write pledges in blood and tattoo political slogans on their bodies as supposedly voluntary acts of loyalty; a visit by Chiang Ching-kuo, then head of the Ministry of National Defense's Political Warfare Department, further changes the prisoners' fates.¹ The film also depicts a romance between 杏子 and the male prisoner 林耀輝, and the fate of prisoners who are executed or die under interrogation.⁵

Historical background

The film is set against the White Terror (白色恐怖), the period of martial-law repression that followed the Kuomintang government's arrival on Taiwan in 1949. Green Island, formerly called 火燒島, hosted political-prisoner detention facilities for more than 30 years after World War II; the 新生訓導處, a camp for ideological reform and re-education, was set up in Neihu, Taipei in 1950 and moved to Green Island in 1951, operating there until 1970, and the people held there were managed by number rather than name.³ "流麻溝十五號" was the common registered household address of the imprisoned "新生" (re-educates), and the women of the camp's female squad appear in records only as numbers.⁶

The source book is an oral history compiled by Tsao Chin-jung and published by the Cheng Nan-jung Foundation in 2002, recording the stories of the women known as the "Green Island girls' squad".⁴

Adaptation from real lives

Only one character appears under her real name: 丁窈窕, executed in 1956 in the 臺南市委會郵電支部案. The three protagonists are composites drawn from several women in the oral history. 杏子 recalls 張常美, arrested in her first year at a Taichung vocational school for joining a student self-government association and later married to fellow Green Island prisoner 歐陽劍華. 嚴水霞 combines the midwife 藍張阿冬, imprisoned through her husband 藍明谷's involvement in the 基隆市省工委案, with 傅如芝, a Hsinchu Girls' School student sentenced to ten years over a reading club and executed at 24 after a smuggled note was found. 陳萍 combines the dancer 蔡瑞月, called the mother of Taiwanese modern dance and creator of the dance drama 《牢獄與玫瑰》, with the Shandong exile students of the 1949 澎湖七一三事件.⁸

Production and reception

The film was the first feature produced by Yao Wen-chih's thuànn Taiwan Film Corporation after he left politics, and it received a Ministry of Culture subsidy of NT$15 million.¹^•⁷ It opened the 2022 Kaohsiung Film Festival and was released in Taiwanese theaters on 28 October 2022, ahead of that year's local elections.¹^•⁶ It was later released in Japan under the title 流麻溝十五号.³

Critics generally praised its restrained treatment of suffering and its fluid handling of multiple storylines, with reviewer 塗翔文 calling it Chou's most mature film to date.⁹^•¹⁰ Others argued the film blurred its characters or softened the era's violence, possibly to reach a wider audience under a protected (保護級) rating.¹¹^•¹²

Debate over history and fiction

The film's release prompted a sustained debate about historical fidelity. Commentators including the scholar 林傳凱 of National Sun Yat-sen University noted that the film was promoted as the first work centered on 1950s female political prisoners, and that responses split along familiar lines: some praised it for recovering a hidden history of people wrongfully persecuted and for insisting that "thought is no crime," while others argued it avoided key historical facts, since many political prisoners of the era genuinely leaned toward communism, and that the film "hollowed out" their ideological content.⁴ A related criticism held that presenting history selectively and omitting women's political agency wronged the survivors whose stories the film cites.¹³

The National Human Rights Museum later arranged screenings for political victims' associations and victims' families as part of its gender-equality programming, using the film to bring a long-buried history before the public.¹⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › War and historical films (individual works) › Historical dramas and epics › Titles M to Z › Titles Sc to Z

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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