Childhood is often cited as a time of simplicity and innocence, playfulness and adventure, a sense of wonder and the joy of discovery and, most of all, love, care and nurture. Taiwanese American filmmaker Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl portrays a relatively knotty side of growing up in the company of adults who have complicated relationship issues, onerous responsibilities and financial hardship to deal with. A single mother Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai) and her two daughters, I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma), who is in her twenties, and five-year old I-Jing (Nina Ye), return to Taipei from the countryside to open a food stall in the night market. Each of them tries hard to adapt to the changed reality, overcome the overwhelming obstacles to somehow find a fresh footing and begin a new chapter in life. But it’s not so easy after all, especially having to make ends meet while being scrutinised and judged for their choices by the extended family. The little left-handed I-Jing is constantly told by her old-fashioned grandfather to not use her “devil’s hand”. She internalises the concomitant confusion and is convinced it’s making her do evil deeds. Baker has, in turn, co-written, edited and produced Left-Handed Girl. Quite appropriately then the hallmark realistic sensibility informs the film as it paints a broad picture of life at the socio-economic margins in Taipei. The observational approach alternates with the sensibility and experiences of the little girl. The focus is a lot on her, quite like it was with the girl of the same age in The Florida Project. The handheld camera of Ko-Chin Chen and Tzu-Hao Kao, tracks her, from the front and behind, as she moves around freely, all by herself, in the vibrant, colourful alleys of the night market. Like the quintessential Alice in a magical wonderland. Women are in the foreground in Left Handed Girl, each trying to survive in her own way, resilient in holding themselves and the family together. Men stay on the sidelines, either evil and feckless or nice but ineffective. The f ilm is grounded beautifully in Nina Ye’s delightfully natural performance that doesn’t feel like a performance at all. She is charming, loveable, adorable with her curious face giving the audience a reason to smile in the thick of looming melancholia of her mother and the restlessness of the sister who missed out on further studies despite excelling in academics because of the limited means of the family. In fact, not just Nina, the entire ensemble of women, including Xin Yan Chao as the wheeler-dealer grandmother is in great form in bringing the hidden tensions and the many secrets and lies of the family to the surface. The film turns into a probe into a family, community and culture, where tradition locks horns with modernity and ugliness lurks behind the façade of the normal. It all culminates in a banquet scene with the reveal of the big family secret. However, it strikes as a false note in the otherwise sincere and substantive f ilm, seeming like an afterthought, a deliberate insertion in the screenplay than emerging organically from the narrative. It adds needless melodrama than texture to the otherwise moving and compassionate story-telling and brings things to hasty, uonvincing closure.