The Launching of our Foreign Literary Documentary Distribution Series

A documentary on the celebrated American crime novelist Patricia Highsmith debuts our new series

August 25, 2023

Since the launching of the Inspired Island series in 2011, we at Fisfisa Media have kept close attention to literary movements worldwide, and have been thinking of new ways to convey some of the power of literature to new audiences. Thus, while we are continuing with our Inspired Island series, which is primarily about authors in Taiwan who write in Chinese, we have decided also to embark on a new far-reaching project, the Foreign Literary Documentary Distribution Series. With this new project, we intend to introduce to new audiences a diverse range of literary works relating to non-Taiwanese writers, including biographies, dramas, animations, and other film types. The topics we cover include writing, bookstores, editing, publishing, and many others. With our more than ten years of experience, which has resulted in the release of more than 20 documentaries already, we hope to bring the literary experience of reading foreign writers to a new generation of film and book lovers. 

In 2023, we released the first film in our new series, a documentary titled Loving Highsmith, about the life and works of the well-known American crime writer Patricia Highsmith. In 2021, during the centenary of her birth, the Swiss publishing house Diogenes published her diaries, which had never been published until then. It was an opportune moment to make her works known to a wider audience, which the documentary filmmaker Eva Vitija made full use of. With Highsmith’s diary entries as her basis, Vitija’s film explores the author’s various love affairs with other women. The result is a powerful documentary that is also a biography of love.

Considered one of the greatest crime novelists of our time, Highsmith published 22 novels and countless short stories during her lifetime. She covered a wide variety of subjects in her work, ranging from crime and murder to psychological thrillers to lesbian relationships. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, was published in 1950 to widespread acclaim. McCarthyism was at its height at the time, and there was still little regard for the rights of homosexuals at the time. Highsmith was forced to hide her relationships, which turned underground as a result. She gradually became like her characters, or her characters became like her: both were guilt-ridden, both led double lives.

Her second novel, The Price of Salt, was based on her own experiences. It was later turned into the film Carol. Commonly described as the first lesbian novel with a happy ending, The Price of Salt has been a beloved work ever since its release in 1952, and has been described as “the Lesbian Bible.” In spite of the work’s popularity, Highsmith insisted that it be released under the pseudonym of Claire Morgan. Not until 1990 was the work released under her own name. 

The Times of London once called her “The Best among the 50 Greatest Crime Writers.” Her 1955 crime novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, which won an Edgar Allan Poe Award, proved to be extremely popular with the public. It would eventually be extended into a whole series of novels. Her writing style has been called cinematic; she excels at the creation of worlds where obsession and secrecy are the norm. Many of her works have also been turned into films. Alfred Hitchcock, for instance, adapted Strangers on a Train into a film of the same name in 1956; and German director Wim Wenders based his work American Friend (1977) on Ripley’s Game. Due to her close association with cinema, Highsmith was invited to be a judge at the 1978 Berlin Film Festival. Since her death at the age of 74 in 1995, her novels have continued to attract the attention of many filmmakers, among them Anthony Minghella, director of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), and Todd Haynes, director of Carol (2015).

Graham Greene dubbed her "the poet of apprehension." Nobel laureate Peter Handke praised her psychological insights: "Since Dostoevsky, no writer has been as generous to the reader as Highsmith, who provides us with so many details on the lives of her protagonists.” Among the gems contained in Loving Highsmith are two entries in her diary: "I am determined to make a good thing of every catastrophe of my life," and "Most of the human race has a blessure. There's always some trauma in childhood. But not everybody chooses to be a writer. "

Loving Highsmith was officially released in Taiwan on August 25, 2023. We hope that the film will help a wider audience get to know more about Patricia Highsmith and her works. 

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