Starry Starry Night

Mei is thirteen and things at home are bad; her parents are about to separate and nobody explains anything to her. The place she misses most is her grandfather's house in the forest. At school she meets a boy as lonely as she is, and the two hold on to each other. When reality presses in hard enough they run away together, heading for that house in the mountains. Along the way the film does not separate the real from the imagined; it shows things as the children see them. Tom Lin's Taiwanese film is adapted from Jimmy Liao's picture book, with Xu Jiao as Mei. Ninety-nine minutes. It takes its title from the Van Gogh painting, and jigsaw pieces, paper animals and a starry sky are its language.