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Introduction：“Xià hǎi” (go to the sea) is often used to describe women who are involved in hospitality industry, falling into a socially unrespectable profession, namely, be drawn into the dangerous sea, which is defined by society for these mistresses. In the social frame, these mistresses are seen as aphasiac. The Hostess recorded the authentic faces of the three mistresses while working, and how they provoke destigmatization and organize a union, in terms of communicating with society. However, the denial and derecognition from the family and society turn out to be the biggest challenge. How are they going to face it?

A Lean Soul examines the life and works of Taiwanese novelist Qi Deng Sheng. The filmmakers were able to have in-depth interviews with not only the writer's closest friends and relatives but also the notoriously camera-shy protagonist himself. The film vividly dramatizes many passages from his intensely autobiographical works of fiction. The result is an intimate and candid portrait of one of the most important and controversial Taiwanese writers.

A young filmmaker, once skeptical of incense rituals, sets out to explore faith through his lens. From street vendors to temple youth groups, his journey captures how belief quietly answers life's questions. A heartfelt documentary bridging gods and people, offering hope and reflection in a post-pandemic world.

The refracted gaze on Mianhua Islet, Taiwan's eastern de facto border, turns the concrete landscape of physical territory into a mirage of topography and politics. The fragmented image of the frontier reflects the ambivalent state of Taiwanese subjectivity. The camera slowly sweeps over the contour of the islet as if touching the country's body to ensure its existence. The ever-imaginary border that eludes, obscures, and fictionalizes the construction of a nation confronts us with its external mirrored image, as a subject and as a site, where the process and paradox of forming national subjectivity are materialized, embodied, and caught in a liminal space.

In 1984, LIU Ruo-yu left Taiwan and went to the United States to learn how to act from Jerzy GROTOWSKI. LIU returned to Taiwan and founded U Theatre in 1988. By visiting masters from various places, they learned traditional skills such as Tai Chi, drums, stilts, Taoist rituals, etc. Through constant physical training, meditation, drumming, and martial arts, LIU established his training and performance methods. In 1998, U Theatre performed Sound Of The Ocean at the Avignon Festival in France. It is now more than 30 years since U Theatre was founded. Where will it go next?

This documentary film follows the journey of former student activist and current political staffer Chen Ting-hao after his decision to escape the cynical politicism of Taipei City to the political backwater of Matsu, an island group administered by Taiwan less than a dozen kilometers off the coast of China. The narrative follows Ting-hao as he reflects on how his political idealism fits in with everyday political reality and ponders Taiwan’s complex political landscape, Taiwan’s relations with a meddlesome yet surprisingly indifferent China, and the perspectives of Matsu residents on Taiwan-China affairs.

A documentary on King Hu.

K’S ROOM is a mental space that serves as a metaphor for the complex relationship between men, boundaries, and the nation during martial law. All the lines in the film were extracted from the sentences used in the "New English Grammar", one of Taiwan's most popular English grammar books, to restructure the mental status of its author, Mr. K, during his incarceration because of the political left.

Five years after participating in a failed government protest in 2009, Sheng-han and his friends storm the Executive Yuan as members of the Sunflower Student Movement. Through failures and choices, these young activists on the cusp of adulthood seek to affirm their self-identity.

The story unfolds in "the realm of bears" that is the heart of the Yushan National Park. It is a place brimming with wildlife ecosystems and aboriginal culture. Fascinated by the area, one female ecologist started her journey searching for bears in 1998 while subsequently developing a close companionship with a Bunun hunter in the midst of this wilderness. Together with copious research, the secret of the Taiwan Black Bear is thus revealed.

Six dads of terminally ill children form a rock band called "Sleepy Dads". With an average age of 52, they aim to to hit the stage of the highly competititve Sea Music Festival. For this old, amateur band, it is as difficult as the Apollo missions to the moon. Nonetheless, these fathers show no fear because they already lead their daily lives on the edge.

Haruo, a director, auditions for a film already partially shot in Taiwan. Thus he meets Ma, a young Taiwanese skater just as disoriented as he is.

A Taiwanese American filmmaker questions her family’s silence around the cycles of violence that have persisted since the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949.

One after another, female Vietnamese laborers arrive, suitcases in hand, at a dormitory from another dimension, cluttered with bunk beds and clothes. Here, they exchange their experiences, culminating in a unique upheaval.

In Taiwan, there is a group of people participating in this race against time. They are hidden inside the film archive of New Taipei City’s “Singapore Industrial Park”, where the 17,000-plus film reels and over a million film artifacts have become their spiritual nourishment. Day after day, they shuttle back and forth inside, carrying their doubts, their learnings, and their faith. What they are doing is awakening these long-neglected film reels, then piecing together the no-longer-existent social atmospheres and lives of distant pasts recorded on them. And spending time in this archive has become everyday life for these film archivists and restorers.

The Check Fun Store is an innovative business model. Every store is divided into hundreds of small checks to display and sell a wide range of creative products provided by people who rent these checks. Thanks to its risk diversification nature, the Check Fun Store business model proliferated in Taiwan when the financial crisis hit in 2007 to carry people through the global economic downturn.

In this short documentary, actress Hsu Feng discusses her iconic role as Yang Hui-zhen in King Hu's A Touch of Zen.

In this film, the idea of the iron rabbit is used as a metaphor for bisexuals’ situation. Something that looks like a rabbit is not necessarily a rabbit. When a straight couple appears, people often consider them to be ordinary heterosexuals. And when two gay people get together, people simply think of them as homosexuals. In this instinctive view, which holds that people are either homo or hetero, bisexuals seem to fade out. This film is a real reflection of the lives of bisexual people in Taiwan. We hope that through the film, people can understand more about bisexuals.

Three commentators sit in a news studio in front of a TV discussing the Tiananmen Square massacre as reported by local and foreign media. This film aims to examine the politics of image and the image of politics through commenting on the topics of democracy, media control, consumption and commercialism.

Despite harsh condemnation and denunciation from society, a heterosexual female pastor founded Taiwan's first LGBT-affirming church in May 1996. For LGBT Christians, who had been rejected by the Christian community for a long time, they finally have a church that offers them a safe haven. Though the founder has passed away, the church members continue to make their voice heard, confronting the unjust social institutions while struggling with religious conflict at the same time. Come hell or high water, they strive to make a difference in the lives of others by telling their own life stories, in hope that love will eventually trump hate and solve misunderstanding someday.

In 2002, Cheng's father murdered his mother. He is both the son of the perpetrator and the beloved son of the victim. That afternoon, he met the children of two other death row inmates. The three of them talked about life, about marriage, and about their greatest fear: their fathers, and the death penalty.

This film is Taiwan’s first protest music documentary, examining Jiao Gong Band 交工樂隊. Jiao Gong Band initially received attention from their efforts opposing the Meinong Dam project. After a brief pause in the Dam issue, Jiao Gong began following farm and farming issues, with their musical style quickly gaining increased popularity. This film discusses the uneasy situation faced by Taiwan’s farm youth. The youth that sets out to the city seeking to develop themselves carry feelings of homesickness from leaving their farm and land; on returning to their hometown after the bubble economy, they continue to push the elder generation to leave the village. Aside from this, because of their difficult social status, farm youth can often only search for Southeast Asian “foreign brides” when seeking marriage. Within the film, new residents (新住民) discuss their feelings and mindset in moving to Taiwan and collaborate with Jiao Gong throughout the album’s recording process.

Using black-and-white images ranging from African statues to contemporary film posters and political meetings, Chihying considers aesthetic dynamics between the West, China and Africa. How did so many African artefacts end up in European museums? And what if this Western power of selection were replaced by Chinese control?

This is a 3-part love story. One girl is talking a story of her ex-boyfriend. He went aboard to chase for homosexual love. Although she stayed home, both of them are experiencing almost simultaneously unbounded sexual exploring journey in each end. The traditional narrative monologue is manipulated as a link to all the experimental segments. As the story goes on, the emotion of those original extremely abstract experimental footages are becoming touchable and understandable.

Short film by Yi-wen Chen.

Ting-ying was diagnosed with a brain tumour. After years of pain, she wrote to Dignitas, a Swiss assisted dying organization, for help. Through 93 letters, she navigated her way toward assisted death, torn between love from her family and partner, and the unbearable pain.

A documentary short about a couple dedicating to marine environmental protection.

Shot by Chang Chao-Tang and cinematographer Christopher Doyle, The Boat Burning Festival captures the ceremony worshipping Wangye（王爺）, the local god of plague, held every three years in Sucuo Village（蘇厝） in Tainan（台南）, Taiwan. Chang timed the work to "Ommadawn", a Celtic-inspired progressive rock album by Mike Oldfield. Defying genre conventions and deviating stylistically from television or ethnographic documentary, the film testifies to the tense and complex coexistence of traditional rites, local folklore, and discourses about modernisation and identity in 1970s Taiwan.

Twenty years ago, AJ returned from San Francisco and began hosting parties to give Taiwanese lesbians a place to meet, dance, and feel free. What started with a few hundred attendees has grown into LEZS Party, a cornerstone of lesbian culture in Taiwan and Asia, expanding into media and branding while paralleling Taiwan’s equal rights movement. This film follows AJ as she plans the 20th anniversary, revealing her emotions, beliefs, and vision to empower more lesbians to challenge the system and make their voices heard.'

Two men diligently unload equipment and materials from a truck, put pipes together, and build a stage for a puppet theater. No matter how few people are in the audience, the show starts and ends as it always has. Convincingly, as if to impress it on our minds, the camera registers from a corner the dust-covered projector and film lying idle in a warehouse, and the presence of the men steadily going about their business. Quietly criss-crossing people and places with the camera onboard, giving way to cars on the farm road, the traveling puppet theater carries with it the ambience of a bygone era in Taiwan.

Using a variety of animation techniques, including egg yolk as paint, filmmaker Wu-Ching Chang creates a stirring tribute to her grandmother who, as a T'ung-yang-hsi, was sold as a young girl to another family and raised as their future daughter-in-law. Forced to perform the household chores and denied an education, this hardworking woman found freedom through financial independence.

Once essential on rainy days in Taiwan, the handcrafted oil-paper umbrella from Meinung,was not only a symbol of local craftsmanship but also a major source of livelihood. However, as Taiwan rapidly shifted toward an industrial and commercial economy in the 1980s, mass-produced plastic umbrellas replaced these meticulously made paper ones. What was once a daily necessity gradually became a nostalgic cultural artifact. Today, a handful of long-established artisans continue to follow traditional methods. With patience and precision, they craft each umbrella by hand. Though its original function has faded, their emotional bond with the craft remains unchanged. Their dedication and skilled workmanship reflect a deep-rooted respect for materials and tradition, preserving a vanishing heritage one umbrella at a time.

The daughter looked through the viewfinder of the camera and gazed upon her father's appearance before he passed away. Then she realized this estranged and absurd father had been influencing her all along. The one she had once run away from was also the one she missed the most.

Four Indonesian female caregivers, each from a different generation, share their lives in Taiwan. On their days off, they gather at Taipei Main Station, reclaiming their freedom while facing the struggles of migrant women. This film unveils their stories, highlighting resilience, identity, and empowerment.

When he was a child, Junya promised his maternal grandfather that as the eldest grandson, he would take over the family Shinto shrine. However, this did not come to pass as Junya did not share the same family name and he grew estranged from his family over time. To escape this tension, Junya ventured overseas to pursue other dreams and distanced himself from the hometown where he grew up. One day, while working in an izakaya, he meets a foreigner with the same birthday researching a new dance piece for a film. His fateful encounter leads him to confront a family history that he has left behind and gives the dancer inspiration for her work. Together in the midst of winter, they revisit Junya's hometown to reconnect with his childhood and let go of a promise he cannot fulfil.

A Chip Odyssey features interviews with over 80 key figures who witnessed and shaped the development of the semiconductor industry — from the first generation of engineers and female factory workers, to policymakers and technology veterans, and today’s young engineers facing new crossroads. This feature-length documentary chronicles how Taiwan built its semiconductor industry from scratch and transformed it into a global technological force, capturing a vital and transformative chapter in the island’s modern history.

When Taipei is still quiet and asleep, trucks after trucks emerge in the dark with fresh fruits and vegetables, seafood and meat. Intermediate wholesalers' auction chants rise and fall; the Central Market is getting ready to feed the city's population. The film offers a glimpse into the lively hustle and bustle of the Market in the 1970s, but was likely banned from broadcast due to its perceived display of the unhygienic conditions.

“Have we ever been to Matsu?” Does this question trigger some mental images, such as flashing postcards inside our mind, or memories of shared photographs through social media? How do we build a landscape of an island? By modifying the geography or by spreading its visual representations? Let’s replace the first inquiry with another one: “Have we ever listened to Matsu?”What would we listen to first? Who would we listen to? What do people in Matsu listen to? As islanders, do they listen to the sounds of the sea or to the sounds of the neighboring country? Is there any document we can listen to about Matsu? Just like images and the internet conspired to transform our vision and memory, may recorded sounds could alter our listening, and therefore our perception of these islands?

The black kite, generally referred to as “the eagle” in Taiwan, used to be very widespread and so common that it is the main character in a well-known Taiwanese children’s game. However, it has now become so rare that very few people ever get to see it. SHEN Zhen-zhong, better known as “Mr. Kite” who vowed to safeguard this endangered bird, is determined that he spent the best 20 years of his life traveling throughout Taiwan to find out why the black kite is disappearing. From 1992 to 2015, the film documentary maker LIANG Chieh-te followed Mr. Kite’s journey. Through his camera lenses, the story of how, one person can cross the species barrier and totally devote himself to a cause with no regrets because of love.

Documenting Taiwan’s first large-scale postwar outdoor concert, this film revisits the 1978 Grass Field Charity Concert, an unprecedented gathering of over 4,000 people. Organized by singer and television host Yang Tsu-Chun (楊祖珺) during the height of the island’s folk song movement, the event foregrounded music’s relationship with everyday life rather than overt political messaging. Yet its significance was inseparable from the era’s tensions: Yang’s self-titled album had recently been banned for the perceived “left-wing” social consciousness of her lyrics, and despite the concert’s stated charitable intent, its scale and popular appeal drew the scrutiny of Kuomintang (KMT) intelligence agencies. Framed against late-1970s Taiwan, the film documents how music, public space, and cultural expression intersected under authoritarian surveillance, marking a pivotal moment in the history of popular music and collective gathering.

The townspeople of Meinung inherited their Hakka ancestors' stamina, diligence and optimism. They continue treasured traditional practices, notably the production of oiled-paper umbrellas.

A documentary on the maker movement and its impact on society, culture and economy in the U.S.

Archive / Lee Guang-Hui is a 30-minute compilation film assembled from footage independently preserved by Chang Chao-Tang between 1975 and 1979 during his work as a television cameraman. Documenting the final years of Lee Guang-Hui—an Indigenous Taiwanese former Japanese soldier who lived in isolation in Indonesia for nearly three decades after World War II—the film traces his return to Taiwan, brief media exposure, and death. Neither a conventional documentary nor a completed historical account, the work functions as an unfinished archive, juxtaposing official rituals, media spectacle, and moments of silence to expose the erasure of subjectivity and the unresolved fractures of postwar history.

We captured images along a boundary within Mongolia, chronicling the contrasting landscapes on each side. This boundary delineates the realms of the Przewalski's horse and the domestic horse: on one side, a 506 square-kilometer sanctuary safeguards wild horses, free from human intervention – untouched and unaided; on the opposite side, horses lead entirely different lives under human care, serving as children's companions, workers, modes of transport, sustenance, and sources of amusement.

As the aftermath of World War II and the Chinese Civil War morphed into the Cold War, Taiwan was ruled under martial law from 1949 to 1987. During the height of the White Terror in the 1950s, thousands of suspected Communists and subversives were arrested; many of them simply disappeared forever. In 1993 a forgotten graveyard of 201 unclaimed victims was rediscovered at Liuzhangli on the outskirts of Taipei. Experimental filmmaker Lin Hsin-I’s Letter #69 explores the violence and injustice that still haunt Taiwan today through the letters of Shi Shui Huan, a political prisoner during the White Terror—all the way up to her last letter before being executed, a blank piece of paper.-UCLAFilm&TV

Poet and author Xi Xi is one of Hong Kong's most treasured writers. Though also acclaimed in Taiwan and mainland China for seminal works like the essay Shops, her writings are firmly rooted in the spirit of Hong Kong. Leave it to Fruit Chan, another staunchly grassroots auteur, to make a documentary on Xi Xi's career. Chan sought out renowned critics and writers to discuss Xi Xi's works, starting with 1979's My City. He also juxtaposes photos of a changing Hong Kong with readings of her writings, and even playfully inserts characters from her stories into the film.

A Taiwanese Odyssey resulting from the assassination attempt by three expatriates in April 1970 on Chiang Ching-kuo, heir apparent to dictator Chiang Kai-shek. The story is told through the life of Cecilia Huang, a gentle and quiet participant previously unknown. With memories shared by people across three continents, the film explores complexity of the human condition, love, betrayal, defiance, regrets, trauma and the possibilities of poetic closure from pain and loss.

Daylight Developing is a filmed family diary in the form of a personal cinema. This work covers a family history and discusses changes in the light of family in the economic globalization, including the constantly moving family, the absence of family members, the room for women in separated families, as well as representations the concept of home; ultimately what is the meaning of home? In the film, the use of light as a symbol highlights the sanctity of the family and the beginning of life and the use of changes in lighting in the home movie remind of the warm atmosphere in l’espace heureux and therefore leads us to imagine the deepening relationships between the members of this family.

The director unexpectedly overheard stories about his mother’s family and decided to pick up a camera to explore a century-old history: Topa, a Tayal tribe that once lived in Sanxia but was displaced to Taoyuan’s Fuxing District due to Japanese rule. The main subjects of this documentary are descendants who are striving in their own ways to preserve the memory of Topa. Through their efforts, the connection between their lives and history is finally being brought back to light.

In a snowy landscape, a man works day and night to restore a two-century-old wooden house – a meeting point of family tradition, war, winding river, and people from elsewhere. Through traditional photography, the director captures emotions in the old window frames, history in the grain of the wooden walls, and memories in the hand-sanding paints.

A group of Taiwanese who were born before World War II still insist on writing poetry and haiku in Japanese language. Director HUANG Ming-chuan has been documenting them for 22 years since 1994. Unlike Korea, another previous colony of Japan, Taiwan retains emotional and cultural ties with Japan even after the War. Over 40 years, these poets and writers get together discreetly under the ban of speaking and publishing in Japanese. More than half a century later, despite aging, they remain using Japanese in the final years of their lives. This film gathers memories of local Taiwanese who have been ruled by several colonial powers since the Dutch arrived on the island in late 17th century. And the path to obtain their own voice became a long way struggle, and so as the national identity.

A disturbing close portrait of a young man who, like all other men in Taiwan, must enlist in the army. Dreaming of saving enough money to enter an Australian art college after having been discharged, he is gradually crushed by the corruption, the verbal violence, and the hypocrisy that festers in the military hierarchy.