Love is a many-splendoured thing in Lee Mi-Mi’s Girls’ School, a Taiwanese gem from 1982 beautifully restored just in time for its 40th anniversary. Screened in the UK at BFI Southbank as part of Queer East, an LGBTQ+ film festival showcasing lesser-known treasures from east and south-east Asian cinema, Girls’ School is a time capsule of social attitudes towards homosexuality in 1980s Taiwan at the meeting point between commercial and arthouse film-making.
As a site of surveillance, tempestuous impulses and healing camaraderie, all-girls’ schools can double as a microcosm for society and have a psychological intensity that has fascinated generations of film-makers. Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) views such places as a source of horror and mystery while The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), adapted from Muriel Spark’s novel, dissects the complex patriarchal forces that control young women’s education. Girls’ schools are also ripe for explorations of homoeroticism and burgeoning sexuality. In Mädchen in Uniform (1931) and Jacqueline Audry’s Olivia (1951), lesbianism emerges as the transformative pull that soothes the loneliness of girlhood.
