Where Have You Been?
你在哪裡Writer, Director & Producer · Ni-Chun Shih
When her mother, newly diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, goes missing in New York, a Taiwanese stage manager must confront the unresolved disappearance of her grandmother—and begin to understand the guilt and love that have kept mother and daughter apart.
Synopsis
Li Yiran has built a carefully ordered life as a theater stage manager in New York. After immigrating from Taiwan as a teenager, she has kept an emotional distance from her mother, Liu Chunhua, whom she still blames for her grandmother’s disappearance years earlier.
When Chunhua’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis comes to light, mother and daughter are brought back into close daily contact. Between rehearsals and caregiving, Yiran struggles to make room for a mother whose determination to remain independent is increasingly at odds with her changing reality.
After an argument, Chunhua leaves the apartment and does not return. Searching the city, Yiran encounters the same fear and helplessness her mother once faced. What begins as a search for a missing parent becomes a reckoning with three generations of loss—and the possibility of seeing her mother as a daughter, too.
Creative Intent
Where Have You Been? is a story about memory, loss, and understanding. Dementia is the starting point, but my central interest lies in the emotional distance between family members: the feelings we carry for years without finding a way to express them.
We often see our parents only as parents. We forget that they were once someone else’s children, with fears, regrets, and circumstances beyond their control. Through Yiran’s experience of caregiving and searching for her missing mother, I want to explore how understanding can emerge through lived experience, even when words have failed.
The film follows three generations of women, each confronting loss and searching for belonging. As Chunhua’s memory unravels, she continues looking for her own mother and a home that exists in the past. In searching for Chunhua, Yiran begins to recognize the wounds behind her mother’s strength.
I want to preserve the dignity and contradictions of both women. A person living with dementia is more than an illness, and a caregiver is more than selfless devotion. Reconciliation may begin with recognizing each other’s pain and choosing to move closer, even when the past cannot be resolved.
Visual Direction
The theater: order and control
Yiran’s professional world is built around timing, coordination, and precision. The theater establishes the structure she relies on when family life becomes uncertain.
New York: proximity and distance
Apartment interiors and crowded streets frame a life in which people can remain emotionally isolated despite their physical closeness.
Taiwan: a remembered journey
A bus journey along the Taichung coast, beneath wind turbines, introduces a solitary, dreamlike rhythm that connects the present with fragmented memories of home.
Development lookbook · Images are visual references, not footage from the film.
Development & Production Approach
Creative development
Developing the screenplay and performance approach around the mother–daughter relationship, the pressures of caregiving, and the movement between present experience and memory.
Cross-border production planning
Planning production across New York and Taiwan, aligning location choices, cast and crew coordination, and post-production with the film’s intimate scale and emotional priorities.