In Broca’s Aphasia, 23-year-old Cheng and five friends run a sex doll service in a hotel, a business with a monthly turnover of more than one million Taiwan dollars. They started working and setting up the company at a young age. Inevitably, their relationships with their family, girlfriends and children become the difficulties or the unspeakable secrets in their lives.

Dir. Su Ming-Yen - 85min - 2022 - Taiwan

"An old downtown hotel had been visited by people with secrets. Each of them was assigned a number, and it was guaranteed that all the secrets would be forever kept in the hotel. No. 287 is quite a unique case. She hides her secrets in this hotel as well as a grand palace where her memories with her lover remain intact. Years later, the old hotel was relocated, and the palace was devoured by fire. All the secrets have thereby disappeared." - Taiwan Int. Doc Fest

"Glimpses into the lives of the workers at the hotel offer a surprisingly human, institutional portrait—turning the camera to the places you least expect for this subject matter...Director SU Ming-Yen humanises the inanimate object’s life to offer a reflection on sex work and the workforce hidden behind closed doors." - True/False

"Taiwanese sex doll service offers eerie insight into male domain...Su Ming-yen’s uncanny delve into the world of artificial women is both fascinatingly mundane and quietly unsettling" - Guardian

"a stark yet intimate cinema verité portrait" - POV Magazine

"the opposite of erotic, partly a picture of pure commerce, with the ready-made uncanniness of the fleshy dolls, but it also felt like hanging out in a dorm....absorbing, complete with a lulling memoir-style voiceover by one of the dolls." - ScreenSlate