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A film director interviews Burmese refugees about their experiences encountering oppression and cruelty in their homeland, and reads aloud poetry about the destruction of Hiroshima by atomic bomb.

A small village, Xiongtuo, situated in the Tibetan remote region in Sichuan, China. By word of mouth, there is a “boiling-water Lama” resides at the village. The Lama lives in a wooden house built by followers, which is in a mountainous area around 5,000 meters high. Every day, countless people from the major Tibetan regions travel across the mountains to visit him in order to seek for the answer for their own lives. They consult with him regarding the questions, such as “Where did my deceased relatives go?” “What is the cause of my headache?” “What should I do if my son is sent to jail?” “Is it still possible for me to remarry my ex-wife?” Meanwhile, the water on the stove was boiled, and the believers wait outside taking off their shirts one by one, ready to get the unique “answer”from the Lama….

Under constant regimes of discipline and incorporation, rituals, faiths, bodies, and the position of man and god all trend towards uprootedness, where we lose our links to the land and to others. Time is dissected into ever more infinitesimal parts. Those who could not keep up now appear within the gaze of a stopped frame. Regardless of man or god, all destruction and rebirth meet at this point in search of a safe corner.

A student, initially serving as a director, filmed his LGBTQ+ teacher but eventually became personally involved in drag. What began as an observer's stance transformed into active participation in drag. Through self-engagement in drag, the director assumed the identity of Rachel and seized an opportunity for a dialogue with self-identity. This experience led to an awareness of the conflicting dialectics between societal frameworks and personal identity. The director embarked on multiple attempts to coexist with and showcase the multifaceted aspects of the transformed, drag persona.

The film depicts the lives of elderly people living in a nursing home: their agony, longing and loneliness. Through the visuals of the film, they gradually illustrate a painting of their life. Love is after all an everlasting treasure intertwined in bittersweet sorrow. Caught in the space between dream and reality, images of wintry Taipei, with its drizzling rain, and the gloomy sky reflect fading minds of these aged women.

A documentary about Taiwan from aerial perspect

The Lost Kingdom traces the rise and fall of the Kung Le Society, one of the most prominent Taiwanese opera troupes to emerge after Japanese Rule. The film compiles archive footage, photos, and rare interviews with former troupe members, telling the story of how the entertainment mogul Chen Chengsan led his troupe to success, transforming the traditional folk opera into mainstream entertainment.

An Indigenous Amis family hunts snails by headlight after a midnight rain on Taiwan’s eastern coast. Back home, as they butcher, clean, and cook them, family members pass on their endangered language to a younger generation and trade ghost stories that echo the fragility of inherited identities.

In the day he is a delivery driver for a factory, but on dates that ends with 3, 6, or 9, he exchanges his dirty work clothes for a mottled apron with a delicate yellow dragon. The apron is like a mission that carries on the last wishes of his late father. Taking over the mantle of his father, he becomes a psychic. He must encounter all kinds of issues, which include joy, sadness, sickness, and even death. Moreover, he faces the dilemmas and helplessness of other people. We want to know how he can find a way of life for those believers, and how he can strike a balance between being himself and a psychic. (Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival)

XIONG,Jie-feng is naive but not easily-influenced. Different from other Chinese young people who prefer working in the cities, XIONG decided to go back to his hometown, Pingzhai Village in Yunnan Province, and started to plant the "Red Rice Seed," a kind of ancient species. The so-called organic agriculture has had an age-old tradition in China. The skills have been passed from generation to generation. This is the major reason why farmers connect to the land both historically and emotionally. The "Red Rice Seed" can only be planted in a traditional and organic way. If the plantation was to succeed, the problems resulted from scientific fertilizers and the overuse of chemicals since the 20th century can all be resolved.

This documentary captures the Lanling Theatre Troupe's 1985 production of Nine Songs on 8mm film, following the troupe's rehearsals and actual performance and meticulously capturing the vibrant energy of Taiwan's experimental theater movement.

In 2016, Cheng Hsing-tse walked out of the prison as the first death-row inmate pending a retrial requested by prosecutors. Cheng was acquitted at last. Yet he cannot forget the kid he met on the day he was led in shackles by the police to pay respects to the kid's father at the mortuary. The kid must have grown up by now. Cheng wants to meet him again to forget about each other.

In the year of 1996, a national weightlifter coach called A-Fu, founded a female teenager weightlifting team with three Bunun girls from the "Taoyuan Tribe". They're either orphaned or raised by a single parent or grandparents. Despite their success in weightlifting, they are confronted with the harsh reality of their family situations, career development and love lives.

Throughout his life, he has been active on four continents, fighting against three regimes. Some say he was ""Don Quixote, who dreams the impossible dreams;"" others say he was ""Che GUEVARA, the only remaining active revolutionary in East Asia."" However, the leader he privately admires is Arafat. His whole life was on the run. Now 97 years old, blind in one eye, figure stooped, he is still combating vigorously, his legend continues...

One day I asked my aunts and uncles about my grandpa. They said Grandpa was a gold miner, a trainee, a businessman and a hero. The stories they told are so difficult to imagine.

An art teacher returns to her childhood home to mourn the passing of her grandmother. As she pieces together the fragmented memories of her youth she finds herself coming face-to-face with the problematic issue of her country’s fractured history. Through an artistic duty that this teacher gives to students, a performance art process that has lasted for more than 10 years, a representational portrait of the island’s collective memory begins to emerge; and in so doing, these young artists have initiated a process by which Taiwan, an island forgotten by the world and in the midst of forgetting itself, can now remember itself and construct a new postcolonial identity through art.

A 26-year-old breakdance champion risks losing everything to chase her dream. Battling family rejection, she questions if dance is her true passion, or just a way to escape reality and be seen.

Around 1992, when Taiwan's documentaries had not yet sprouted, Chen Yingzhen produced a documentary about the 228 Incident, titled "Testimony February 28th", and compiled the testimonies into a book by Yeh Yun-wan.

“Lio-ma-gou” is the only fresh water in Green Island, In the 1950s, in a political prison concentration camp, held nearly 100 female political prisoners. With the film, let us follow the pursuit and inquiries of the young generation, and approach the two “former female political prisoner.”

On an ordinary morning, she brushes her teeth, but when she looks into her own image in the mirror, she sees totally a stranger. She had required a surgery three years ago to change her jaw. This is a story about a person who dislikes her body and decides to take action.

Before and after the lifting of martial law in Taiwan, there was a group of photographers who remained steadfast in their beliefs. Undeterred by the pressures of the mainstream market or government interference, they boldly ventured across the country, presenting firsthand material to the public, regardless of whether their perspective was objective or not.

Chiayi's City Center Fountain is deeply embedded in everyday life, layering a rich cultural foundation. In the "post-roundabout era," youth creativity injects new energy to reimagine the old town. From a traffic circle to multidimensional revitalization, how does this new generation bring fresh trends to the century-old landmark and traditional trades? The film captures this dialogue across time, exploring the fusion of old and new. More than a landmark, the fountain symbolizes the heart of Chiayi, where collective memories come full circle.

Director TSENG occasionally began to record the daily life of her mother, out of the need of completing her documentary assignment at school. The films presents a mother's persistence when facing difficulties and her love for her children. In the meantime, interactions and conversations between mother and daughter are revealed spontaneously.

Suat-ah is a contrary and stubborn woman, One day, she suddenly left, and we lost her before we had time to say anything. Suat-ah is my mother. The son tried to reconstruct the documentary of his mother's memory figure in the non-existent reality, hoping that the memory and warmth of his mother could remain in this world.

Drawing on the first-person accounts of former postal worker and political prisoner Hsu Chin-Yu and her peers, this documentary confronts the grim fate of some who dared to oppose the authoritarian regime of 1950s Taiwan.

In 2021, an orchestrated coup d’état in Myanmar shuts down the country. Gao Gao, who can no longer go to school, spends his days with his friends in the village, passing the time by playing with toy guns, going through life as if nothing has changed despite the unrest around him.

While suspended from a crane eight storeys up in the air, a man performs a guitar solo. The act staged in homage to a failed art project from 20 years ago is one of several moments in Taiwanese history that artist Hsu Che-yu unearths and reanimates.

Centred on the interwoven relationship between nature, spirituality and ritual, Charwei Tsai's​ "Lanyu — Three Stories"​ portrays the everyday life of the Tao people.​ Telling three short stories, the video is a journey into the indigenous communities that live in Lanyu, a rocky island off the southern coast of Taiwan, which controversially houses the nuclear waste of the country's three nuclear reactors.

This documentary tells the sorrow and helplessness faced by villagers in Nansalu Village (Ming Tribe) of Namaxia Township at southern Taiwan, a hard-hit area by typhoon Morakot. The twelve short stories about homes depict the kind of emotional entanglement experienced by the tribal people after going through a drastic disaster. These stories portray the cruelty of reality and allow the audience to see how it forges endurance of life.

River Without Banks (2014) takes poetry and war as its main theme. As homage to Death of a Stone Cell, the film is structured into ten segments; each led by the first lines of the first ten stanza of the poem. Correspondences between the poet and his friends are incorporated throughout, taking the audience back and forth between Lofu's youth and middle age, only to eventually depict a full picture of the protagonist. The camera follows Lofu on his trips back to the bomb shelter and tunnel in Kinmen and his hometown Hengyang in Hunan Province of China, while also capturing his daily life in his adopted country of Canada. Acclaimed as the "Wizard of Poetry", Lofu shares through the film of the most insightful reflections.

The film focuses on Cao Liou, a 25-year-old drag queen. The explosive creative energy he delivers is stunning, but at the same time, he also displays his egotistical nature and wanton lifestyle. Director Pan Hsin An is the same age as Liou. He peeps into Liou’s life through a camera lens, questioning and exploring. During the filming process, the two often fail to understand each other, and each has his doubts about the other. But in the end, at opposite ends of the scale, they find the same desires behind huge differences.

Hong Kong is facing tyranny, and a pair of brothers are marching on their own ways in the revolution. However, the horror is approaching, and it’s like this city knows everything, it reborns after it collapses. There seems to be a huge energy behind this, asking inwardly: What is the fight for?

This is a story about a father who drifted from New Zealand to Taiwan to look for his missing son. Although his son was never found after many fruitless searches, he gained love and friendship from many Taiwanese. This documentary tries to trace a father’s journey for searching his beloved son as well as to present how he recovered from his initial pain of losing son and turned it into his love for Taiwan at the end.

By constructing, re-filming and hand animating the photographs and objects, island is no more an geographical term, but a state of mind, in which the film as a process and medium to express nostalgia and reexamine my relationship among land, nation and identity.

This is a story about individuals from small, geographically marginal communities who still maintain a connection with nature, illustrating how they honor their ancestral hunting culture by reinventing and reinterpreting it.

2013／HD／Color／52min／

Li Yi-Fan’s What Is Your Favorite Primitive (2023) narrates “a death match” between the artist and their software while grappling with the production process. In a fight between social and ethical concerns, it also raises questions of image production and communication.

Taking care of the children on their own, a group of women just realise how ignorant the whole society is, regarding the daily needs of mothers and children. In this film, the filmmaker shares her own experiences with two other women caught in the same dilemma.

Eighty years after World War II, memory clings like frost to glass-blurred, fractured, yet never fully fading. Filmmaker Ming Chun retraces the forgotten journey of Taiwanese soldiers conscripted by Japan, captured by the Soviets, and exiled to Siberia. From departure and defeat to captivity and return, he follows a path of war and displacement-toward a home that no longer felt like home. Across Taiwan, Japan, and Russia, he searches for traces of their lives-abandoned camps, fading photographs, fragments of memory-while opening a dialogue across three generations: elders whose recollections falter, children burdened with unanswered questions, grandchildren confronting fractured identities. When history falls silent, what do we hear? And where do restless souls finally belong?

When working in Tokyo, Erika embarks on the journey of stepping outside the role prescribed by her biological sex and relieving the suppressed feminine self. This film documents Erika’s life journey of gradually building up her ideal body image, including the sexual reassignment surgery (SRS). Through Erika’s experience moving between Japan and Taiwan, as well as male and female identities, the film sheds light on the unique life experience of transgender people.

In this documentary, 60 men living in 7 cities were interviewed to see what they were looking for, revealing their experiences of love, lust, and lost as gay people in modern times.

That Photograph is an 8mm experimental film made from an animated still. From the Czech photographer, Josef Koudelka’s photography book, KAO chose a photo of his family beholding a body and made copies of it in a myriad of ways. The photo and the camera are stationary; however, the relationship formed between them through production is in motion.

Hua Yang and Afa are two competitive freediving athletes. One is focused on breaking the deepest record in Asia, while the other aspires to claim the crown of Taiwan’s top freediver. Both received invitations to compete in the prestigious Blue Hole Vertical Blue Depth Competition. This documentary follows their journey from land to underwater,capturing their contrasting styles and perspectives as they merge in the tranquil yet mysterious blue depths.

Umezawa Sutejiro came to Taiwan to work in 1911, and had stayed in Taiwan ever since then. He participated in design and construction of nowadays, to name a few, Songshan Cultural and Creative Park, Law School of Taiwan University, T&L Hsin Chu, Taichung Normal University, Chiayi Art Museum, Tainan Art Museum, Hayashi Department Store. This documentary film is in attempt to draw a finer portraiture of Umezawa by interviewing Umezawa’s grandson, scholars and architects and by focusing on the discourse of Chiayi Art Museum building. It also intends to pay tribute to Umezawa.

"Zhongsen Theatre" opened in 1968. At that time, the theaters competed with each other. The Zhongsen Theatre still managed its own characteristics in many theaters. However, after 2000, the old city was down, and it was closed to the changes of the times. The company was closed down and idle. As the old city began to recover, the theaters also changed hands, but most of them did not present the cinema, and the Zhongsen Theatre was sold to the construction company in 2016. The film records the demolition of the old theater and the rescue of two antique projectors, hoping to find a more suitable place for them to preserve and continue the spirit of the times. After the demolition is completed, the site is intended to be used as a new residential construction site.

In the documentary “Millets Back Home,” we will see the everyday lives of the Tayal people, an indigenous people of Taiwan, stringing together the stories of three families with the unifying thread of millet (“trakis” in the Tayal language). The documentary brings to light the pressing issues indigenous people face today: the shift in farming patterns, the migration of indigenous youth, and the need for preserving and restoring traditional culture. With this film, Director Sayun also explores self-identity in connection with indigenous identity.

A family of traditional film projectionists grapples with generational tensions and shifting traditions as they screen movies for gods and the forgotten at temple courtyards.