Charged with violation of the Water Act, the indigenous community living under the San-ying Bridge was forced to witness their shelters and homes being torn down by the government every year, while the sand and gravel processing plant on the east bank grew larger and larger; the garbage mountain on the west bank higher and higher. This absurd cycle became so familiar that the children of the community began to build and demolish make-believe houses as a game.
1,103 Matches Found
Four artists decide to invite their parents to play the parts of dissidents in 1980s Taiwan. To get prepared for the performance, the artists show the actors footage from that time, initiating the discussion of arts and politics. Although none of them were involved in the event, they are still caught up in the story as well as their own past…
Time Splits in the River
On 14 May 1989, the Far Eastern Textile Industrial Union passed a resolution in favour of strike action. However, the Hsinchu County government and police authorities actively helped the employers in breaking the strike action. This film documents the 17-day desperate protest lasting until the employers announced a full return to work, finally concluding the battle.
Far Eastern Textile Workers' Strike
“Lifeng Coal Mine” (利豐煤礦) in Sanxia, Taipei County, was once Taiwan’s largest specialized coal mine. Unable to compete with cheap imported coal amid Taiwan’s impending WTO accession, the mine shut down, leaving 118 miners unemployed and sparking disputes over pensions and severance pay. San Yan (《散宴》) follows several aging miners, including brothers Huang Wu-yi (黃武義) and Huang Rong-quan (黃榮全), documenting their reflections on unemployment and their lifelong labor underground. After sharing one final farewell banquet, the miners’ “black gold dream” disappeared together with the closing mine. Through the film, the director moves beyond stereotypical images of miners’ hardship, portraying instead the quiet resilience and optimism of these “last-generation miners.”
Farewell Party
Ripples Apart is the story of windsurfer Chang Hao, who grew up in the Mountains of Nantou, the only region in Taiwan with no coast. Chang and his Australian coach, Alex Mowday, share a unique and rare bond, two athletes separated by years of age and very different cultures, but who hunt the same Olympic dream. The road to the Olympics is long and difficult. Alex and Chang Hao must beat the odds to qualify, training on the small island of Penghu, off the coast of Taiwan, battling the wind and waves and searching for perfection in the sport of their dreams.
Ripples Apart
The Tang Family After 228
An interview went on. We tried to figure out the film we worked together. Simple but complex. Time is such an interesting thing.
A Conversation: Review of our short film
As farmland vanishes and neighbors sell their land, one family faces the same fate. Through conversations with an elder left farming alone, the filmmaker explores the quiet struggle of letting go and the deep values rooted in the land, seeking to preserve something before it inevitably disappears.
Fallowing
The Taoyuan Aerotropolis project, Taiwan's largest urban development, forces nearly 10,000 families from their homes. As land is leveled and memories erased, residents struggle to preserve their roots. Powerless against economic progress, they cling to the fading traces of a homeland on the brink of disappearance.
Forever Home
They were once Taiwan’s wildest stunt heroes! In the 1970s, a taxi driver led the nation’s top stunt riders and daredevil performers to form the "Shenfeng Stunt Troupe," risking their lives in breathtaking shows that packed arenas and made headlines across the island. Now, the aging team leader’s youngest daughter sets out on a journey to find and reunite the former comrades who once "burned their youth on tires." When the Rumble Sounds Again is a true and thrilling Taiwanese legend — a story that reignites the roaring engines and unyielding spirit of a generation that refused to give up.
When the Rumble Sounds Again
Vanitas
Iin Marlina
Over the ten years, Ino has been passing down the Atayal culture with real actions, imparting all he learnt from the forest to children in Cinsbu. The audiences can feel his natural philosophy of life in his words and deeds. He makes people realize that there exists genuine, pure and beautiful relationship between human and myriad elements of nature.
The Tale of Ino Yumin
Lumi, formerly homeless due to family issues and business failures, spends a decade in odd jobs, park benches, and internet cafes. Joining a social enterprise, he gains skills, saves money, and rents a place, but his past still haunts him.
Nowhere to Go
The protagonist of the documentary, Yifang Lin (1926-2018), was born in Chiayi in the 15th year of the Republic of China (Taisho 15th year). When he was young, he went to Hiroshima, Japan to study with his elder brother. During the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, he happened to leave Hiroshima because of work and survived this disaster.
Yifang
Birds and Us
In 1985, US company DuPont received permission from the Ministry of Economic Affairs to set up a titanium dioxide plant near Lukang, Changhua County. The local residents held a series of protests against the plan, even one in front of the presidential office. This rising community consciousness, combined with a growing environmental awareness, ultimately drove DuPont out of the region.
Lukang Residents' Anti-DuPont Movement
A-He, a 70-year-old film projectionist, has worked for 37 years in Shin-Rung theater in which just shut down recently. To make a living, he went to other theaters in Chiayi to look for a job. However, he was rejected due to his age. Suddenly, he felt he has lost something that has always been the majority in his life. Idling, he still went to Shin-Rung theater to clean up the projection equipment and tidy up the reels every day while waiting for the new investor to reopen the theater. One day, A-He returned to the theater and played a film. A long-awaited reunion is presenting through the image with movies.
No Films Today
Too Flawed to Fix: The Illinois Death Penalty Experience
At the foot of a mountain, there is a one-hundred-year-old house. Closely connected with each other, four women decide to become a real family there. In their capable hands, they build a home for women in this once deserted house.
House Women Home
1949大遷徙
穿上脫下
In the pre-dawn hours near a temple are the homeless people with nowhere to go and nothing to do. People pass by without seeing them, police cite and release them over and over, politicians make hay out of issues, and poor people keep exploiting other poor people by playing the lottery. Surveillance cameras are everywhere on the streets, coldly recording everything, devoid of emotion.
4891
This film follows a girl who has been living with depression for many years, and explores the concept of “I’m sick” through different points of view. Everyone has experienced low moments in their lives or been through dark times in the past that are rarely talked about. It is hoped that this film can transform these emotions into positive energy in our lives.
Tree Hole for Secret
Haunted by the tragic death of his father, a young Argentinian filmmaker of Taiwanese origin returns to Taipei to film the reunion with his mother. Reality and fiction blend in a moving personal quest in which an incredible portrait of a mother stands out from the picture of a family saga marked by uprooting.
The Song of the Moon
The most difficult decision is to end the life of the beloved.
A Decision
The first public gay wedding in Taiwan has stirred up considerable controversy, including a local campaign to ban this film. It tells the story of Yosheng and Gary, the first gay couple to have a public wedding in Taiwan. Their wedding was held in conventional Taiwanese fashion: a wedding banquet with friends and family and even the mayor of Taipei as the promised wedding moderator.
Not Simply a Wedding Banquet
In order to advocate Taiwan’s independence and to defend the freedom of speech, CHENG Nan-jung chose to express his disappointment towards the ruling authorities by self-immolation. Thousands joined his funeral procession on 19 May. When they arrived at the presidential office, a disciplinary patrol, CHAN I-hua, lit himself on fire, taking concrete action to follow CHENG’s footsteps.
To Die for Taiwan (Cheng Nan-jung's Funeral Procession and Chan I-hua's Self-Immolation)
Stones in Chiayi's streams bear the marks of time and the land's memory. Seventy years ago, Zhan Long began carving tombstones, turning cold stone into living art and founding Chiayi's stone monkey tradition. The second-generation sculptor infused family memory and cultural sentiment, making the stone monkey a city symbol. Today, new self-taught artists reinterpret the craft, letting tradition endure and be reborn, bearing witness to the warmth and vitality of culture.
Still, the Stone Monkeys of Chiayi
Reunion
Taiwan With a Twist
experimental short film but not that EXPERIMENTAL?????
Kaleidoscope
The Gathering
Wedding, a big event. It took place during lucky hours, following traditional conventions until the daughter left the house and female family members got in. People involved then happily raised their cup and said, "Congratulations! Wish you a destined good affinity, a marital happiness, a soon-born offspring, a harmonious union for a hundred years, blessed and felicitous." "Thank you!" replied the female family members, with smiles.
C
Review
The Ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou’s dream of becoming a butterfly blurs reality and fantasy, reflecting a poet’s desire for freedom and eternity. The coming of Tulku draws from Buddhist classics, using Chou Meng-tieh’s life as a metaphor. His experiences at WuChang Street and his bookstand, started in 1959, led to enlightenment and loyalty to Buddha and loved ones. Influenced by Buddhism, his poems blend Zen with grace, affection, and prudence, capturing life’s essence with strength and delicacy. He closed his bookstand in 1980 due to illness.
The Inspired Island: The Coming of Tulku
A group of Pangcah people left their homeland in the eastern Taiwan to seek jobs on the western coast. They drifted from one construction site to another, until they finally settled on a temporarily unclaimed clearing behind a university, building a community far away from home. Despite the instability of work and earnings, they lived life to the fullest catching fish, growing vegetables, singing and dancing, even electing leaders of their community in this 'new paradise'.
New Paradise
Voices of Orchid Island focuses on the Yami on Orchid Island, a small island located 45 miles off the southeast coast of Taiwan in the Pacific Ocean.
Voices of Orchid Island
Liu Na’ou’s The Man with a Movie Camera is comprised of five episodes, shot in four cities across national boundaries: Tainan, Canton, Shenyang, and Tokyo. It displays impressionistic street spectacle and images of quotidian life, as well as excursions by train and ship, unfolding as a private visual journal and a sort of souvenir, but with refined framing, camera movement, and rhythmic editing. With his own perspective and artistic sensitivity embedded in this film, struggling between being a Japanese colonial subject and a Taiwanese/Chinese litterateur, Liu attempts to transcend geological, national, racial/ethnic, linguistic and medial boundaries, to establish a depoliticized, internationalist, cosmopolitan cinematic utopia, a pure cinema, and a fluid and contested identity.
The Man Who Has a Camera
Where All Windows Meet
Abei Is Missing
Taoyuan County Magistrate Wu Chih-yang continued to promote the Taoyuan Aerotropolis project despite strong disputes from social movement groups and local residents, leaving expropriated households in constant anxiety. On the day of the local chief election, the incumbent County Magistrate Wu Chih-yang lose the election, the residents were surprised and delighted. After experiencing this dramatic election of "voting with tears," the residents of the Anti-Aerotropolis Eviction Alliance decided to nominate Wang Pao-hsuan, Deputy Secretary-General of the Taiwan Association for Human Rights, who has long been involved in anti-eviction issues, to run for legislator to challenge the old political structure of the locality. However, during the campaign, in addition to encountering "external threats" from the original local political factions, the "young social movement activists" and "traditional villagers" in the team also had differences in their ideas about the campaign methods.
Civil Education
Directed by Lih-Kuei Chen, this film honours Professor Chiou’s legacy and traces his journey from early disillusionment under martial law in Taiwan, to formative years in the United States, and decades of community-based activism in Australia. Through interviews, archival footage, and his own writings, the film explores Cold War exile, the making of diasporic identity, and the small but powerful role of critical thought in shaping transnational Taiwanese democracy. More than a portrait of a single intellectual, the documentary reflects on broader dynamics of cultural resistance, diaspora diplomacy, and the political life of ideas beyond the Taiwan/China binary.
Life's Good
The Tiger God project originated during the artist’s residency at Cien Art Village in Hualien in 2021, inspired by a Sikawasay (Amis priest) who said a concrete tiger carried a soul. The work explores encounters between Han folk beliefs and Amis spiritual traditions, reflecting on suppressed indigenous histories in eastern Taiwan under colonial and religious forces. Nighttime fireworks symbolize external impacts on the land, linking concrete animals, mining, and colonial imagination. The ritual opera returns the footage to the land and gods, weaving ritual, research, and reflection into a narrative about silent objects and memory.
Tiger God
Tell you a secret... : Ban-Ma in Her Forest
happening
My brother passed away in 2013 and my parents hold opposing beliefs about where he went after death. In search of answers, I turn to spiritual professionals, hoping they might offer real clues to the question: Where'd My Brother Go?
Where'd My Brother Go?
Under the Green
The Kung Fu Rap: Spirit of Hip Hop From the Alley
Immature is an animated documentary that explores the fluidity and complexity of gender identity through bodily imagery. Shaped by memory and imagination, it presents an intimate dialogue within the body. Fluid, fragmented, and ever-reforming, the film traces an ongoing journey of exploring gender, sexuality, and selfhood.
Immature
The protagonists of the film are are siblings whose mother, Euis, gave up her dreams as a young girl due to financial difficulties and came to Taiwan to work as a migrant laborer before eventually marrying and settling down. Now, as the siblings’ dreams begin to take root, they navigate the cultures of Indonesia and Taiwan, transitioning from childhood to adolescence—a journey from which there is no turning back, marked by a unique cross-cultural experience of growing up.
Childhood In Between
Within families, emotions often weave a web—delicate, intricate, and inescapably entwined. This documentary delves into the depths of humanity, the cycle of life and death, love, the complexities of in-law relationships, and the awakening of female consciousness. It sheds light on the lives of the “women who remained,” revealing how they carry on after the passing of their husbands, facing the weight and trials of everyday life. Together, they weather the tides of joy and sorrow. No matter when impermanence arrives, they continue to find quiet direction amidst the rhythms of daily living—a quiet testament to the resilience that life itself holds.
Move On
Memories of Lin's Family
“Road to Human Rights” revisits Taiwan’s authoritarian past through the stories of four political prisoners during the nation’s White Terror era. The documentary resonates with viewers across generations, especially younger activists, who play a crucial role in effecting change in Taiwan’s politics and society.
Road to Human Rights
The government's discriminatory policies, wars, profit-seeking politicians, and capitalistic exploitation forced indigenous peoples to leave ...
Children of the Sun, Keep It Up
Now I understand that the more completely the dinosaurs were annihilated, the wider their domain extended. They not only controlled the forests that covered the continents, but also penetrated into the depths of human thought that remained on Earth. Starting from the ancient, fear and doubt inducing ancestors, they continuously stretched out their necks and raised their claws, expanding their domain.(Calvino "The Dinosaurs.")
How to Imagine the Unimaginable
When The Flowers Bloom
Natural Formosa
Dao-Shun Zhang began to study magic with his magician father, Qing-Zhou Zhang, at the age of 3. He is a child with moderate to severe hearing impairment. His father led him into the world of magic. At the age of 15, he has participated in magic competitions all over the world, but Dao-Shun said that he has lost his passion for magic. He does not want to continue to make a living as a magician in the future, but his magician father expects him to inherit the family business. Now Dao-Shun is faced with the career choice of the junior high school entrance examination. How should Daoshun face his future?
My Magic Teacher is My Dad
More than 60 years ago, my father followed his parents and took the train to Kaohsiung. Little did he know it was a one way trip and grew up in Liuhe Night Market ever since. Then he became a Japanese tour guide, traveling around and accompanying countless families. The most complete time we spent together was to go out with my father’s group–a way to improve intimacy. Due to the pandemic, his work has been suspended. If the past is a kind of scenery where sight-seeing is laid above; this film is a journey of himself.