Caitlin Fang

Historical knowledge is deliberately incomplete in Caitlin Fang’s central 2025 role. Born in Taiwan in 2006, she made her feature debut in American Girl as a teenager returning from the United States to Taipei while her mother undergoes cancer treatment. At fifteen, Fang won the Golden Horse Award for Best New Performer and received a Best Actress nomination for the same role. Later work including The Post-Truth World showed that her screen presence was not dependent on one autobiographically adjacent part.

Quick movement between watchfulness and direct confrontation became useful preparation for stories organised through a young person’s limited but perceptive viewpoint. Fang led Chen Yu-hsun’s completed historical feature A Foggy Tale as Huang Chiu-yue, known as Yue. Set during Taiwan’s White Terror, the story follows a teenage girl trying to recover her executed brother’s remains. On the journey, she meets people surviving through compromise, humour and mutual assistance.

Yue does not possess the viewer’s retrospective knowledge of the period. The performance must therefore let political reality emerge through immediate obstacles and gradually accumulating observation rather than make the character speak as a history lesson. Fang learnt Taiwanese Hokkien intensively and sustained long passages in a language she had not previously spoken fluently. Preparation affected rhythm, breath and reaction as well as pronunciation.

Her youthful, sometimes stubborn practical energy remains active against an atmosphere of fear and obscured information, enabling humour and impatience to coexist with obligation to her brother. She also works opposite performers from different generations without surrendering the film’s adolescent point of view. A Foggy Tale opened the 2025 Golden Horse Film Festival, received eleven Golden Horse nominations and won Best Narrative Feature. Fang earned a Best Actress nomination, her second in that category before twenty.