The Rooftop

Yu-Cheng (Joshua Yang) is a Taiwanese teenager with a girlfriend, Wen-Ting (Vivi Yeh), and a problem he cannot explain: whenever they are intimate, he struggles to breathe. He tells himself it is nerves, or the heat, or nothing at all, but the pattern persists, and so does the pull he feels toward his classmate Ching-Hao (Hu Jhih-ciang). Writer-director Po Cheng Teng's debut short asks a pointed question, whether a young person's body truly belongs to him, and answers it through small, closely observed moments on school rooftops and in bedrooms where the expected script of adolescence does not quite fit. Tai-chi Fan-Chiang co-stars. The Rooftop premiered at Canada's Reelout Queer Film Festival, screened at KASHISH Mumbai, Oslo/Fusion and the Honolulu Rainbow Film Festival, and won a Bronze Remi Award at WorldFest-Houston. Here TV presents it as part of Queer Quickies 207.