Will You Still Be My Friend, directed by newcomer Lu Po-shun, is a stunning debut for the first-time director. The movie draws from contemporary social issues in Taiwan while managing to hold a vivid character drama.
The film follows two students, Jun and Ting, who live in rural Yunlin. Jun, who is Taiwanese, is the son of the village chief. On the other hand, Ting, a reticent outsider who has few friends, has a Singaporean father and speaks with an accent. His parents are solar panel vendors, something that brings them into conflict with the local community, seeing as solar panels displace farmland and aquaculture.
The conflict between Ting’s parents and the rest of the community bleeds into how other young people in the community treat him. Jun, in the meantime, tries to maintain his standing with the local community while, at the same time, seeking to introduce Ting to his friends. Secretly, the two are best friends—or perhaps more, with a hint that the two young men may have romantic feelings for each other.
The conflict between solar farms and traditional farming practices is a real-world social issue that rural communities in Taiwan are currently navigating. Insofar as this interfaces with longstanding issues of political corruption in rural communities, Will You Still Be My Friend manages to capture these dynamics quite well—one thinks of very few other contemporary Taiwanese films that have managed to do that, with Laha Mebow’s Gaga being perhaps the one other Taiwanese movie in recent memory.
But more than that, Will You Still Be My Friend is ultimately a compelling character drama. Ting and Jun’s dynamic is what drives the movie and, whether interpreted as romantic or not, it is compellingly and beautifully depicted, showing the vicissitudes of young people as they relate to each other in a rural community, and as they mature. Indeed, if many Taiwanese movies have tried to shoot from a young person’s viewpoint, they usually fail to take a ground-level approach to the lives of contemporary youth. Will You Still Be My Friend manages all this and more. It is not to be missed.
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Will You Still Be My Friend (Chinese: 日光) — Taiwan and Singapore. Dialog in Mandarin, Taiwanese Hokkien, and English. Directed by Lu Po-shun. Running time 1hr 40min. First released September 19, 2026 at the San Sebastián International Film Festival. Starring Jaden Wang, Aloysius Looi, Lung Tien Hsiang, Lu Yi-ching, Andie Chen, Kate Pang.
This article is part of Cinema Escapist’s dedicated coverage of the 2026 San Diego Asian Film Festival.
This article is also published in No Man Is An Island, an online publication focused on the connections between everyday life and politics. No Man Is An Island is brought to you by the team behind New Bloom Magazine.