As the first Indigenous woman film director from Taiwan, Laha Mebow is best known for feature films focusing on the Tayal community. Her 2022 feature film, GAGA, garnered Laha the coveted best director award at the 2022 Golden Horse Awards, an annual celebration of Chinese language cinema. With it, Laha became the first Taiwanese woman and the first Indigenous director to win the Golden Horse award for best director. Her previous feature, Lokah Laqi! (Hang in There, Kids!) won five awards at the 2016 Taipei Film Awards, including Best Narrative and the Grand Prize. Lokah Laqi! was Taiwan’s submission to the 2017 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.
Born in Nan-ao, Taiwan to a mother who was a teacher and police officer father, Laha was raised in the bustling city of Taichung. Following her graduation from the Department of Radio, TV and Film at Shih Hsin University, Laha worked in Taiwan’s film industry, including projects by director Tsai Ming-liang. She later joined Taiwan Indigenous Television, where she further honed her writing and production skills and first began learning about her Tayal heritage. In interweaving Tayal characters and settings with the complexities arising from the Tayal community’s interactions with contemporary society, Mebow has compared her approach to filmmaking to Tayal handloom weaving, a demanding skill that Tayal women of earlier generations were required to master.
Prior to her work in narrative features, Laha has produced four documentary films over the past decade, including Ça Fait Si Longtemps, an Austronesian peoples music documentary that explores the connection between Indigenous pop musicians and Kanaky musicians from New Caledonia.
