Lu Xiao Wei is a Taiwanese-born, London-based director whose path to filmmaking began with the body, not the camera. Trained as a ballet dancer from age five in Taichung, she left dance at sixteen for fine art, where a teacher introduced her to the Taiwanese and Hong Kong New Wave, Edward Yang, Wong Kar-wai, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, and cinema took hold. After completing her MA at Goldsmiths University in London, her self-made short films traveled to festivals across the US, Europe, and Asia, including the LA Asian Pacific Film Festival, London Short Film Festival, and Berlin Fashion Film Festival, earning Best Sound at the New York City Independent Film Festival and catching the attention of production companies along the way.
Her work lives at the intersection of cultural identity, music, and subculture, documentary in instinct, cinematic in execution. She has directed campaigns for Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, and Johnnie Walker, including the Tommy Hilfiger x Formula 1 film featuring Damson Idris and a Lunar New Year film for Johnnie Walker created with designer Robert Wun, as well as a Boiler Room documentary set in Taipei's underground club scene. Influenced by the unflinching intimacy of Nan Goldin and Nobuyoshi Araki and the kinetic experimentalism of 2000s music videos, Lu makes images that feel inhabited rather than constructed, where the emotion lives in the frame, not performed for it.
