Like every spring film festival, the Far East Film Festival in Udine faced a choice: skip a year or adapt. It chose reinvention, pushing the event forward two months and streaming films to accredited viewers online. A festival dedicated to popular cinema from the Far East naturally tilts toward spectacle and genre entertainment, though the audience favorites—the Chinese Better Days and Malaysian Victim(s)—both tackled bullying, a scourge that knows no geography.
Among the award winners was a world premiere: I weirDO (2020), directed by Liao Ming-yi and shot in Taiwan on an iPhone. Smartphone cinema is no longer novel, so the visual polish here comes as no shock—the film takes special care with lighting and set design to capture the inner lives of its characters. The look matches the story.
What's striking, in these times, is how the protagonists wear masks everywhere outside their homes, removing them only to speak (anything else would be cinematically awkward). But they wear them for a reason: both have obsessive-compulsive disorder, a condition that grips their lives with rigid force. She also has a skin condition that keeps her largely housebound.
I weirDO begins as a surreal romantic comedy, playing the early stages of their meeting and courtship for laughs. Then, in its second half, the frame widens—literally—into something more serious and reflective about the role of illness in a romantic bond. Yet this shift rests on a risky premise: that OCD, unlike so many other conditions, can simply vanish overnight if you find the right internal switch to flip and become well.
In the film, their shared struggle becomes the spark that ignites their connection. It quickly becomes the glue holding them together, fueling various charming scenes in which they tackle their semi-disabling problems as a team. But strip that away, and does everything collapse? Do we fall in love with a person or with their illness? Here lies the film's central paradox: it almost feels like a surreal version of what often happens in real life—as Jason DaSilva recently documented in When We Walk—where chronic illness becomes the greatest threat to a relationship between a healthy and an unwell partner. In I weirDO's invented world, where illness can come and go, you might fall in love with someone because of their illness, but only while that illness is shared. The moment it lifts, you risk sliding back into the well/sick divide. Only then do you grasp how hard it is to separate the person from the disease, and how difficult it becomes to know what your real feelings are.
These are questions the film only brushes past—a work that's often very funny, yet carries an undertone of sadness, tackling serious matters with a touch too much schematic simplicity. Still, beneath its paradoxical exterior, I weirDO conceals themes about love that are anything but obvious or easy. It speaks to the strangeness of truly knowing another person.