This film captures some changing moments that took place in Hong Kong between 2018 and 2021. The changes in the landscape of our city are also a portrayal of the author's inner heart - cold rain, hot fire, and continuous loneliness.
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This film captures some changing moments that took place in Hong Kong between 2018 and 2021. The changes in the landscape of our city are also a portrayal of the author's inner heart - cold rain, hot fire, and continuous loneliness.
Between Mount Kavulungan and the Gaoping River, history streams across the wilderness, coalescing the values and identities of different peoples. So begins the Pakedavai family ritual. As an 11th-generation descendant of the Pakedavai ruler family, Dabiliyan Alifu grew up in a family slate house in the Sandimen tribe. For him, the family is a constant source of education about how to live with the forest and what kind of person to become. Of Pakedavai’s 12th generation, Kang Yuan-Jin grew up in a traditional Chinese community with a Paiwan grandmother and a Chinese grandfather. Only in adulthood did he start to explore the meanings of family and personal identity.
"People who have been abandoned by their family can only seek reunion with their second parent." Mads, a depression sufferer, is not accepted by her family. She wanders to find where she belongs and who will love her. After a failed suicide attempt to jump off a building, her life swings between the chaos of her symptoms and fleeting moments of happiness, continuing her journey with trauma and sequelae. Will she find the “haven” and be accepted by society this time?
Kinmen is a group of islands governed by Taiwan and a solid base for the capitalist camp during the Cold War era. Kinmen commenced its construction of military fortifications in 1958, with millions of soldiers stationed on the island. As the USSR communist bloc gradually disintegrated, Kinmen began a large-scale withdrawal of troops in 1988, placing the lives of the island’s 50,000 residents in a predicament after having relied on soldiers to earn a living for so long. With the improvements of cross-strait relations, large amounts of Chinese tourists now flood the very islands they once rained countless bombs on. Tourists from both sides of the Taiwan Strait now take group photos in front of fortifications, but will the future of the cross-strait relations be as fine as the seemly peace?
A group of guerrillas retreated from Burma to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War in 1961. They settled down and lived in virtual seclusion in four villages in the south of Taiwan. Now, fifty years later, excavators are digging uncanny holes on their land for the sake of economic development. To them, the days of forest battles have long gone, but another silent inner war has just begun.
Journalist Shu Meng-Lan takes her award-winning documentary series to the big screen. Filmed across 115 locations around the world over 15 years, Shu and her team have captured amazing footage of melting glaciers at the poles as well as the plight of helpless creatures living in those regions. Aiming to advocate for greater ecological awareness from a Taiwan perspective, the film is an important cautionary tale, reminding us that the fate of the polar regions is closely linked to our own.
An overview of Chiu Fu-sheng, a fundamental producer and promoter for Chinese cinema. He worked between China, Taiwan and Hong Kong producing the best films by authors of the caliber of Hou Hsiao-hsien and went through eras that are reflected in his work: the war in Vietnam, the Chiang Ching-kuo era of Taiwan, the reform and the opening up of mainland China, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the handover of Hong Kong.
Four men are obliged to take a short-term counseling class about domestic violence. Each of them has problems like unbalanced communication, custody, marital conflicts and tension between the wife and the mother. The director documents the perpetrators with an in-depth perspective of how they've faced their family and conflicts and digs into the truth of love in the name of violence.
My father's attempt to reminisce by his childhood seaside became one of the most inexplicable experiences of his life. The film strips were buried for 28 days in vinegar, mud, cheese, nato beans, beer, and kimchi. The disintegrated imagery produced by the decomposition is reminiscent of the fragmentation of memory.
Jointly directed by filmmakers from both sides of the Taiwan Strait, The Forgotten City tells the story of how Taiwan and China each built special housings to meet the need of an era, and how, as time went past, these housings became ruins. The residents in Taiwan's 'dependents villages' and China's 'third-front factories' now face the fate of their homeland being abandoned or demolished...
These lawyers battle for the vulnerable and feel a responsibility to give it their all. Just as the guardian who looks out for the children playing in the wheat fields in the novel 'The Catcher in the Rye,'... they act out of good conscience and continuously press forward for justice and the rights of the people with no thought for themselves. In times like these, this film depicts modern-day warriors writing a new chapter in history.
An experimental poetic investigation of one of the world's largest e-waste recycling sites, Agbogbloshie, as a contact zone of complex global economic, social, power-political and technological processes.
For more than two decades, internationally acclaimed artist Chen Chieh-jen has illuminated the deep impact of power on bodies and architecture. Here he explores a pair of sites built by the Japanese colonial government in the early 20th century: the Losheng Leprosy Sanatorium and the Taipei Prison. The first was on the outskirts of Taipei, the second in the heart of the city. Both were used for controlling marginal populations; both continued to operate long after the Japanese left; and both were eventually torn down for urban redevelopment. Across its four sections linking different times, places and people, Realm of Reverberations reveals cycles of construction and destruction, and the ironies of emotional attachment and historical detachment.-UCLAFilm&TV
Li Ze-yang's journey in music was bumpy yet full of colors. His musical collection serves as a historic witness to ethnic communities. His relentless editorial commitment proved a quintessential scarcity in the history of Taiwanese music.
A truck drives into a square and a moveable tent is set up. Audience members enter and hear the faint voices from the cracks in society. As the tent becomes a convergence of the thoughts of those both on stage and off, we feel the power of resistance that the entire action entails. Functioning both as observer and participant, the director documents the tent's movements around Taiwan in the past decade.
Thirty-four year-old Alun formed the first hip-hop dance group 'The Party' soon after totalitarian rule ended in Taiwan in the early 90s. The group eventually disbanded, but Alun's passion for hip-hop remained. He's about to compete in Juste Debout, a worldwide street dance competition to take place in Paris. Where will this journey take him? Eight high school students born in the 90s, and half the age of Alun, make up 'Undergradu-eight' Supported by a more open society that has come to embrace pop culture, what is the dream they're hoping to achieve through hip-hop?
Tao litterateur Syaman Rapongan bridges the bond between father and son through the Tatala and his writing, preserving the memory of his people. Spanning seventy years, the film interweaves footage from different eras, evoking the spirit of the language and culture rooted in the sea and the body. Along this journey, Syaman Rapongan learned and borrowed a foreign language to tell the story of his own people.
An indigenous couple married young with a child when they were only 16 and 19 years old. The financial burden and challenges in life were so heavy for them that quarrels were unavoidable. As their former elementary school teacher, the filmmaker recorded the young couple’s daily life, while trying to give them a hand in their time of need.
This documentary depicts the journey of displaced students and retreating troops from the Yuheng United Middle School, crossing the treacherous terrain of Guangxi's mountains into Vietnam. They were then forced into French concentration camps before being relocated to Pulau Bidong, where they established settlements and protested through hunger strikes, garnering international attention. Their story portrays the plight of displacement and eventual return to Taiwan.
Mentioning Diao-yu-tai evokes an immediate patriotic response in Taiwan due to the territorial dispute between China and Japan, sparked by a 1968 oil field survey in the East China Sea.
Director CHAN Chia-Lung spent several years running through the forest, mountains and the sea to record the butterflies. This documentary is with delicate and affectionate narration, cute and funny animations, amusing soundtrack, and immersive sound design, it leads the audience into the microscopic world of the purple crow butterfly, and experience the amazing life of a purple crow butterfly together.
An elderly man cooks himself some noodles and eats them straight from the pot while watching TV by himself. He dozes off at his job as a security guard. Alone since the death of his wife, the father’s daily life is filmed by his daughter. While turning her gaze on ordinary things like garbage, keys, puppies, flies and lizards, we can almost sense the strong smells of summer and the sound of thunder at night. Suddenly, the father turns and waves to us. The father-daughter bond is expressed here in very few words.
Intimate recordings in the personal surroundings of the maker. By re-ordering individual shots, hidden meanings emerge.
A self-destructive and anxious 30-year-old man and his 26-year-old friend with a camera. It's a personal film about their relationship in the last years of a life - battling the HIV virus. The flamboyant man flirts with the camera while the filmmaker is tormented, forcing himself to go on filming. Their sincerity when facing the undefeatable facts is moving.
This documentary examines Taiwan's role within the war machinery of East Asia, and how air-raid shelters have transformed from military defense structures into part of the everyday landscape. By guiding audiences through the often-overlooked landscapes of Chiayi, the film calls for renewed attention to historical sites and explores how war has shaped urban structures and collective memory. It also invites reflection on the lasting impact of war, reminding us that war is never as distant as it seems.
Taking place on Victory Lane in Keelung, this film delves into the lives of three Korean women in their 70s, shaped by war and identity struggles. Unable to return home after migrating during the 20th-century Japanese colonisation of Taiwan, they endure the physical and emotional toll of living between Korea and Taiwan, forgotten in the divide between the two countries.
The Land in the Middle of the Pond makes reference to the 1950’s forced displacement of the Atayal Qara community from their ancestral territory for the construction of the Shimen Reservoir – now the main water supply for Northern Taiwan. Throughout the video, we hear the voice of an elder who recalls the events which resulted in the forced displacement of her community and the impact of diaspora. In the video we see Ciwas tracing veins that run along her limbs like rivers. During the performance, later Ciwas and other Atayal women engage in an Atayal name exchange ritual, between person and plant. This customary ritual Ciwas employs like the tracing of her bloodline at the reservoir, as a symbolic act for reconnecting with her ancestral land while affirming her identity past, present and future.
Two athletes from opposite sides of the world rise above discrimination and pressures of race and nation to stage the greatest duel in Olympic history and forge a lifelong friendship.
The director's pregnant sister moved to Hsinchu upon marriage and hasn't returned to Taipei in a year. Their mother hoped to tend his sister during postpartum confinement, but instead, this made their relationship deteriorate even further. The director also uses the camera to search for traces of his father, a Taiwanese businessman in mainland China who has been absent since his childhood. The film tells the story of how their family fell apart more than 30 years ago and then came back together.
Collection of home movies which was shot by Deng Nan-guang, the well-known photographer, during 1930-1940s.
After more than a decade in the financial industry, Jeff HUANG decided to leave his comfort zone at the age of 33 and changed his job from an analyst to a mixed martial artist without a regular income. Jeff walked away from it all, moved to Brazil to train. Upon his return to Taiwan, Jeff entered the professional world of MMA and became known as "The Machine". But In the face of his family's doubts and marriage crisis, will he be able to continue to follow the path he has chosen?
After restoring their Ceremony of Ancestral Spirits, the Atayal people of the Raisinay Village, Miaoli County, were distressed by the absence of their traditional garments. Yuma Taru, a researcher of Atayal folk costume, decided to trace back their history by conducting interviews with the elders, learning weaving techniques from them. This documentary captures the passing down of the weaving art, and the younger generation’s yearnings for revival of their traditional clothes.
It is a visual record of long-lasting open wounds, Chinese medical progress, and the disappearance of memory. This documentary examines the current plight of a small group of elderly Chinese peasants who have been suffering from open wounds for over 70 years. The director visits some elderly surviving soldiers of Unit 731 – a WWII Japanese secret unit devoted to biological warfare.
In 1949, the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan. But some went into hiding, waiting in the jungles of northern Burma and Thailand for orders from Taiwan. President Chiang Kai-Shek told them to keep hiding out in the jungle and to wait until the time was ripe to “retake mainland China” from the communists. They ended up waiting for fifty years and became a lost army.
In 2009, a DNA test report that "does not rule out the possibility" turned Chen Longqi from a witness to a defendant. After he was found guilty, he began to flee, fearing that he would not be able to clear his grievances in prison. Fortunately, four years and thirty days later, he met a judge who was willing to investigate again, and finally changed the verdict to not guilty. But from guilty to innocent, what he saw in front of him was the ruin of his career, heavy debts, the mental panic of long-term escape and hiding, and many people who wanted his help and were also suffering from unjust cases...
Free market capitalism has not only effected the flow of capital but also the global migration of labor. Laborers cross national borders to “developed” or “developing” countries and take on low-paying job in the service sector. The growing number of international laborers and new immigrants, usually of various nations and ethnicity, has now begun to have certain impact on the host society. For example, in Taiwan, the lure if high income might subject them to the employer’s exploitations. And policy makers and employers rarely take into account their sense of displacement.
Structured around a dancer's routine, the film unfolds in four stages: hope, fear, anger, and longing for stability. It interweaves these emotions with those of locals of Matsu, the military, and first-time-visiting photographers from Taiwan island.
In 2018, Taiwan was kept busy by noises of the election, among which the process of restarting the coal-fired power plant in Shen’ao was the most controversial and eye-catching. I followed the diving and canoeing instructor, recorded the rose coral reef and searched for a rare species of mollusk, the Epimenia babai Salvini–Plawen, in the waters of the local conservation area, and explored the ecological truth of Silence at the bottom of Deep Shen’ao together.
Jinguashih and Jiufen were once the biggest gold mining towns in Taiwan. As the collectors and amateur artists later came to this place, a community is gradually growing.
HUNG Chun-hsiu spent seven years filming three residents of Kinmen island: an owner of a local photography shop, a retired officer and a Chinese woman from Sichuan province who came to Kinmen with the hope for a better future. Using photographs and archival materials, HUNG explores the personal stories of three residents and how they reflect upon the upheavals between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait.