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During a dark moment in Bing Liu’s “Preparation for the Next Life,” our protagonist, Aishe (Sebiye Behtiyar), seeks guidance in a place she did not think she’d return to: a mosque. An undocumented Uyghur immigrant from China, Aishe has left behind the religion in which she was raised. But feeling alone and stuck in New York City, she turns toward this place of cultural familiarity, where the imam counsels her that she’ll be rewarded for her obedience in her next life. But what about this life, the one she’s living now?

Aishe has been preparing for her next life since she arrived in New York, getting stronger, smarter, faster, so that she can make the leap to an existence that’s more comfortable, safer, more abundant. Like most young girls with big dreams, there’s only one thing that can slow her forward momentum and that is, of course, a boy.

“Preparation for the Next Life” is the narrative feature debut of Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker Liu. His much-lauded film “Minding the Gap” is a searing and searching project about his childhood friends, a group of skateboarders he followed over the course of a heady transition period, often turning the camera on himself and his own family.

In “Preparation for the Next Life,” Liu once again trains his lens on the delicate coming-of-age that is the early 20s. As the title of this adaptation of Atticus Lish’s 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award-winning debut novel suggests, it captures a liminal time in which Aishe, in reflecting on her past while getting ready for her future, is surprised by the arrival of a new person who enters her life and asks her to stay in the moment, at least for a little while.

Aishe locks eyes with Brad Skinner (Fred Hechinger) on the street in Queens and they share an immediate intrigue. He’s recently been discharged from the Army, arriving in New York with some cash and a desire to do anything but go home. The young couple fall into lust, then love, over beers in a Latin American cowboy bar, Uyghur street food and then in a shabby basement apartment. Skinner is a reprieve from Aishe’s life working in brutal restaurant kitchens for under-the-table wages; Aishe is a grounding force for Skinner, grieving the loss of his best friend and managing his PTSD symptoms with a cocktail of meds and plenty of booze. They are both utterly alone in the world until they have each other.

Liu transports us into this small but affecting love story with stunning, saturated, fluid cinematography by Ante Cheng and a swooning score by Emile Mosseri. The filmmaker deploys this lush aesthetic to make us fall in love with Aishe and Skinner’s impossible, head-over-heels romance.

He weaves in Aishe’s childhood memories of her father, with her Uyghur language narration addressed to him, as she asks imploring questions of a man who will never be able to answer. Skinner’s military background inspires her own physical training, jogging miles and lifting weights. She’s always seeking her father, not just in Skinner the soldier but in herself too, the remnants of his presence thrumming through her memory.

Ambitious, driven and desperate to change her station in life, Aishe contemplates marriage, hoping for a path to legal status, though the only free advice she can get from an immigration lawyer is to be careful about whom she marries. She heeds this warning, starting to realize that this boyfriend might not bring her freedom but deadweight, as much as she tries to help him help himself. The scenario is high stakes given both Aishe’s status (she’s at one point arrested and detained) and Skinner’s mental health struggles, but this is a classic tale of a first love that curdles from sweet to sour.

The compelling performances and Liu’s artful direction elevate the script. Behtiyar, in her debut feature, is spectacular, eyes fiery, her expression often inscrutable, body in constant motion as Cheng’s camera follows close behind. Her connection with Hechinger is palpable, heady and heated, despite their characters’ differences, and it’s nice to see Hechinger in a more adult, romantic role, even as Skinner falls prey to his own demons.

Liu does indulge in the prolonging of heartache and indecision, and the story stalls while heading into the third act, the film stretched beyond what the material can sustain. Nevertheless, “Preparation for the Next Life” is a powerful assertion of dreams, humanity and hard work, arguing that every person has a past, a future and a story to tell. Some loves are for a lifetime, others just a moment, but nothing’s stopping Aishe from what she wants in this life — or her next.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

It has been a whirlwind four months for Taiwanese American director Shih-Ching Tsou, whose debut feature Left-Handed Girl makes its North American premiere at TIFF this weekend.

The emotional family drama revolves around a single mother and her two daughters who are coming to terms with city life in Taipei after several years of living in the countryside.

Their move back to the Taiwanese capital, where the mother sets up a food stand in a buzzing night market, brings them into closer proximity with her family.  

It’s not a particularly happy reunion for the youngest daughter I-Jing. Her left-handedness upsets her superstitious grandfather, who tells her never to use her “devil hand”.

After taking more than two decades to get the feature over the line, Tsou’s career has shot into top gear since the spring, with Left-Handed Girl world premiering in Cannes Critics’ Week in May; being acquired for most global territories by Netflix in June and then selected as Taiwan’s 2026 Oscar entry in August.

In between times, the film has been touring the festival circuit, recently touching down at the New Horizons International Film Festival in Poland and Melbourne, and next heads to the Deauville American Film Festival and London after TIFF.

“My life has gotten so much better. People are contacting me to find out what I’m doing next. Agents and managers are reaching out.  I have a lot more opportunities and doors opening. Hopefully, I will be able to make my next film much quickly,” Tsou tells Deadline ahead of the Toronto premiere.

Prior to Left-Handed Girl, Tsou was best known as a close collaborator of Cannes Palme d’Or and Oscar-winning director Sean Baker, whom she met while studying at  The New School’s School of Media Studies in New York.

The pair co-directed, wrote and produced the 2004 film Take Out, about an illegal Chinese immigrant who gets on the wrong side of debt collectors. Tsou would then collaborate on Baker’s solo directed features Starlet, Tangerine and The Florida Project.

Talking to Deadline back in May prior to Cannes, Tsou and Baker recounted how the idea for Left-Handed Girl had grown out of the former’s experiences as a child.

“Like in the film, my grandfather told me that my left hand was the devil’s hand. I told Sean about this, and he was like, ‘Wow, we can write a story about it’. We went to Taiwan in 2002 and shot a short trailer with still photos cut together,” recounted Tsou, who is left-handed but was educated to use her right-hand as a child.

“When we came back to New York, we made Take Out together, and put Left-handed Girl on the backburner, thinking that maybe if we made that first, we would be able to get funding more easily. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. It wasn’t the right time.”

Baker went on to make solo feature Prince of Broadway in 2008 and in 2010, prior to the shoot of his next film Starlet in 2011, the pair spent more than a month in Taiwan working on the project again.

“2010 is when we decided, we’re going to do this. Up to that point, it was only a couple of treatments, and a trailer that we threw together to find financing but the 2010 trip was the trip when we said, ‘Let’s spend over a month there and really absorb the environment’. We often make our films with a focus on location. We wanted to find the right night market and the right binlang stand (betel-nut stands traditionally run by pretty young girls) and flesh it out in many ways,” said Baker.

While this research trip solidified their belief in the project, it would take another 15 years to get the film over the line.

“We just couldn’t find financing for it. It was very difficult, a fully Mandarin language film. We wanted Shih-Ching to solo direct it. It took until after The Florida Project for interest to start picking-up,” said Baker.

Tsou credits French film company Le Pacte for helping to kickstart financing, after they showed the distributor the screenplay in 2021 following the Cannes premiere of Baker’s Red Rocket on which it held rights for France.  

Le Pacte’s Jean and Alice Labadie take producer credits alongside Tsou and Baker as well as Mike Goodridge at UK company Good Chaos.

Principal photography eventually began in July 2022, with Taipei’s real-life Tonghua Night Market acting as one of the key backdrops, which came with its own set of challenges.

“We couldn’t block off anything. We’d have had to block off 10 stands to do that, but we didn’t have that kind of budget. We only rented one noodle stand on the corner, hoping we’d be able to get through the shoot without any problems,” said Tsou.

“It took us a month to convince the stand owner to let us use the stand… and we had to talk to all the neighbors, because they were worried about how it might affect their business too,” she continued.

The production worked with a team of just five people for those scenes in a bid to not attract too much attention.

“At one point, our actress was on the noodle stand and we were working on a scene, when a passerby came-up to the stand and tried to order noodles from her,” recounted Tsou, who kept the cameras rolling.

“The market is one of the characters, not just the backdrop. I think the audience can feel that when you follow little girl into the night market, you see all the color, hear the noise.”

The movie features Taiwanese household name actress and model Janel Tsai in her weightiest role to date as the mother while her two daughters are played by Instagram discovery Shih-Yuan Ma and child star Nina Ye.

Baker, who edited the film alongside co-writing and producing, praises Tsou’s casting.

“Shih-Ching produced, directed, cast, everything. I was only involved at the beginning stage and the end stage,” he said.  “Coming in afterwards and seeing the footage as one of the co-writers, it was interesting to see all the choices that Shih-Ching made.

“One of the really satisfying parts was how wonderfully she cast it because that’s when I saw the characters coming to life, and they were how I imagined the characters to be” he added.

Baker highlighted big screen debutant Shih-Yuan Ma, for her performance as the rebellious, troubled older daughter I-Ann.

“It was such a pleasure to edit her stuff, because in every take, she was giving Shih-Ching such a consistently strong performance, and every take was slightly different. For a first timer to have already that much method behind her performance, that much confidence, it was incredible to watch,” he said.

“I was really taken aback when I heard that Shih-Ching had cast her from Instagram and that she was a model. Because that rarely works, the model-turned actor-thing. But, my god, she’s great.”

Shih-Yuan Ma’s character of I-Ann is the lynchpin to the drama, hinging on a series of family secrets that come to a head during a big family get together in an explosion of emotion, with hints of Mike Leigh.

“The ending definitely has elements of Secret and Lies,” admitted Tsou. “We’ve also watched a lot of Dogma films, things like The Celebration. There’s a lot of human emotion, and questions around how you deal with human emotion and make peace with yourself.”

Tsou is now gearing up for the awards season circuit following the film’s selection as Taiwan’s entry in a competitive field.

“There were 11 candidates this year. We had our fingers crossed but it wasn’t a given, so I was very, happy when it was announced,” says the director.  “I want to bring Taiwan to the world stage so that people will get to know the country a little more, maybe even want to visit.”

It’s a spotlight that has taken on extra resonance amid tensions in Taiwan over concerns that China could be gearing up to act on its long-held goal to bring the self-governing island state under its control.

Tsou is also looking forward to rolling the film out in Taiwan this fall with a compact indie release. As is common, in the territory, she is overseeing the release as the producer of the film.

“It will be a reasonable release of 36 to 40 screens. It’s an indie film. We have to realistic. In Taiwan, its often the producers who oversee the release. I’ve hired freelancers to work on the promotion but I am basically self-distributing in Taiwan,” she explains.

Netflix will give the film a limited theatrical release in the U.S. on November 14 ahead of its launch on the platform on November 28.

“Having the film be made available to 300 million people all over the world is a really big deal. Not many Taiwanese films get shown to the world. It’s a big step for a Taiwanese film,” says Tsou.

Looking beyond the awards season, the filmmaker has a number of ideas on the boil but nothing firmed-up yet.

“I want to put all my  attention on Left-Handed Girl right now. Having spent years making it happen, I want to celebrate that, and then after take a little break and figure out what I really want to do next,” she says.

“I have a lot of different ideas. One is a New York story, one is another Taiwanese story, and then I also have stories set in Japan, and in Italy,” she adds, noting they are all personal stories inspired by friends and acquaintances. “I want to dive into a different culture, a different country, to kind of study it and make a film that still tells a very human story.”

Tsou also hopes to keep collaborating with Baker on some level.

“This film is very special to me because it was the first idea we wanted to make together and we made Take Out instead. Now we’ve come full circle, and made the film we wanted to make at the very beginning,” she says.

“I want to make my own films and tell my own stories but at the same I would love to work with Sean again, and of course have him edit my films.”

Check out the new official trailer for Left-Handed Girl below: