This chapter examines cinema's potential to ethically regard sexual and gendered violence and film aesthetics’ capacity to screen rape culture without subjecting women to essentialised visual modes of subjugation, or similar sexual violence, in the context of Asia's media and film industries. It explores Nina Wu (2019), a psychological thriller about an aspiring Taiwanese young actress, Nina Wu, who moves to Taipei from her rural hometown. After juggling insignificant media odd jobs for eight years, Nina finally gets an opportunity to audition for a lead role in a 1960s spy romance thriller, Spy Romance. To her dismay, Nina learns that this role requires her to get naked in a risqué sex scene. Whilst she lands the part, the audience eventually learns that the film's executive producer, Fat Cat, drugged and raped Nina during her audition. A film about making a film, Nina Wu interrogates the circumstantial contexts, psychological aftermaths and other consequences that enable sexual and gendered violence against women within Taiwan's media and film industry. Initially the chapter considers Nina Wu in relation to the #MeToo movement and the specificities of its Taiwanese context, establishing in the process how the film's engagement with rape culture relates to ongoing debates concerning cinema, ethics, the gaze and affect. For the remainder of the chapter the film is analysed in terms of its aesthetic features (especially its shot composition, mise-en-scène and cinematography, self-reflexive storytelling, and the tracking shot), drawing out thereby both Nina Wu's illumination of how rape culture is enabled in the Taiwanese film and media industry and as a consequence, the insights this particular film offers concerning the correlation between screen ethics and cinematic affect.

Beyond Hollywood and outside Anglo-American contexts, Nina Wu problematises rape culture as a symptom of deep-seated misogynist and patriarchal structures of power that protect perpetrators within the Taiwanese film industry. In Media Ethics: Cases and Moral Reasoning, Clifford Christians and coauthors argue that the #MeToo movement expresses itself differently in socially conservative cultures within Asia, especially because social barriers and gender inequality make it difficult for women to speak up about sexual violation and assault (2020: 80). As such, #MeToo or #TimesUp in Asia may manifest differently, where empowering individual women to speak out about specific incidents of sexual harassment and assault is insufficient (i.e. to think beyond the dichotomy of perpetrator/victim as the construct of rape culture).