‘Left-Handed Girl’ is a vivid, fast-moving drama shot entirely on iPhones, and it has the unmistakable energy of a Sean Baker project – fitting, as Baker, fresh off his Oscar win for ‘Anora’, serves as producer, writer and editor.

The story follows a single mother and her two daughters as they relocate to the bustling night markets of Taipei. The elder girl dresses provocatively and looks for connection in all the wrong places, while the five-year-old has developed a curious habit: she steals small items and blames it on her “cursed” left hand, a superstition planted by her grandfather. It’s a child’s coping mechanism, but it also becomes a metaphor for the family’s buried shame.

Like ‘The Prince of Tides’, this is a film where long-suppressed secrets come crashing to the surface, and it happens during the grandmother’s chaotic 60th birthday celebration. Whether it’s an attempt at confession or revenge, wounds that have shaped – and damaged – this family finally spill out into the open.

What makes it especially compelling is the contrast with the rest of the extended family: everyone else is wealthy and successful, while this mother and her daughters run a small noodle stand and live with constant money worries. The film doesn’t hide its commentary – being a girl is already a disadvantage in this patriarchal world, and being a divorced mother is worse.

The Taipei night market is practically a character in its own right: colourful, frantic, full of noise and neon. Much of the film is seen through the five-year-old’s eyes, which gives it an almost breathless immediacy. The handheld iPhone camerawork is always in motion, the editing quick and electric – very much in the spirit of ‘Anora’.

Ultimately, ‘Left-Handed Girl’ is a story about hustling to survive on capitalism’s margins, and the uncomfortable truth that, even after seismic family revelations, life still demands you get up the next morning and keep going.