An in-depth documentary on the reclusive Taiwanese artist Huang Hua-Cheng and his avant-garde legacy. Commissioned by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum for the retrospective exhibition: “An Open Ending: Huang Hua-Cheng” (2020).
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An in-depth documentary on the reclusive Taiwanese artist Huang Hua-Cheng and his avant-garde legacy. Commissioned by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum for the retrospective exhibition: “An Open Ending: Huang Hua-Cheng” (2020).
Mr. Lin is a happily retired man who spends his time keeping company with his toddling grandson, walking his dog, and playing golf with his in-laws. Recently, he has been obsessed with houses with river views. In Lin's city of demolitions and reconstructions, money-making investors buy and sell houses at unaffordable prices. Above the skyline of Taipei, will the boundaries between daydreams and reality ever blur?
This film follows the lives of undocumented Vietnamese workers in Taiwan doing odd jobs to survive, after having been forced to flee their employers due to harsh working conditions and lack of medical care. How will living this way for more than a decade shape their lives?
The expressions of democratization are usually interpreted by elites from two different parties but neglect the real faces/ life of every individual among the resistance rally. The director (a confused twenty-something) looks back upon the 40-year-history of democratization of Taiwan through the life experiences of two old-timers (who are grass-root rebels). He attempts to discover what causes their actions and decisions to be lefties, and what are their limitations.
Chu Tien-Wen, frequent screenwriter for Hou Hsiao-Hsien, makes her directorial debut with this entry in The Inspired Island documentary series. With Hou as producer, cinematographer Yao Hung-I and editor Liao ChingSung, Chu takes a deep dive into the story of her parents, famed authors Chu Hsi-Ning and Liu Mu-Sha. Through family albums, old letters and interviews with fellow writers, Chu crafts a deeply personal portrait of her parents’ romance, literary careers, family roots and the unfinished opus her father left behind.
Grace Fisher was an active musician and dancer until a rare spine disease almost derailed her budding career. In this award winning documentary, we see grief transformed into gratitude and tragedy turned into opportunity.
Documentary short examining the life of the indigenous Taiwanese singer, Panana.
Eighty years ago, Weng Nao, a Taiwanese young man wrote essays and novels, documenting his life in Koenji, Tokyo. He dies on the eve of the Pacific War, and his death remains a mystery. Eighty years later, the directors come to Koenji to look for the forgotten truth.
In the 1940s, as the fate of the Chinese people and the dignity of Chinese Buddhism fell into the nadir, a 14-year-old boy was ordained to be a Buddhist monk in Jiangsu Province, China. Since then he has embarked on a journey to pursue and spread the Dharma for nearly 70 years.
Four college students wanted to shoot Hollywood videos and finally persuaded the driver of the shuttle bus, Little Wolf Dog, to participate in the show. In order to seize the time to rehearse with the busy driver, they crowded in the car and staggered around to rehearse with the little wolf dog when they went out to rehearse. Unexpectedly, an accident occurred during the filming, which made them reflect on the overworked work style of large truck drivers, the salary system of basic salary plus bonus, and driving on dangerous roads day after day... Real life is indeed more real than movies. It seems that he is at a critical moment at any time.
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.
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?
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.
The Good Daughter is a portrait of the fraught marriage between a Taiwanese man and his Vietnamese bride. Born out of a disabled man's wish to obey his mother and a woman's effort to help her family escape poverty, the marriage has produced two daughters and a complicated drama. The film takes us inside a household simmering with tensions.
Eight years in the making, the film focuses mostly on Ming Chuan University’s alumni cheerleading team preparing for their alma mater’s 60th anniversary celebration in 2017, capturing their practices, team building exercises, meetings and other activities with endless playful banter.
Dremedrema is the chief heir of her tribe. Being the eldest, she therefore, must accept her inheritance of the position and status according to the tradition.Though her mother and children hope that she would disavow the obligation. Even Dremedrema had run away from her tribe once, her ancestral spirits has never given up on her. She is a tribal chief who doesn’t speak the native tongue. At the same time she is a devoted single mother of three. She is a chief without her traditional tribal family house, unable to live within the tribe. She misses home. But despite ten years’ effort, it is a home that she cannot easily return to.
This is a story about indigenous people's land rights. In order to learn more about the history of the Atayal people’s migration, the director traces the journey of the Atayal ancestors.
On the Matsu Islands, young wrestlers enjoy the moment of victory or defeat and use wrestling to fight against their boring life. But "finding a way out" is always the most difficult issue just like Matsu in the middle of the troubled strait.
An experimental documentary which opens with a story of my family: my American aunt found a painting of my grandmother by chance, in a random Chinese restaurant in the middle of nowhere - she said she cried. By tracing this story and reproducing its meaning, the film wonders through different topics: the construction of the Cold War, USA and Taiwan relations, different generations of Chinese diaspora since the 1950s, contemporary immigration and cross-nation fluidity, family romances, religion, and ancestors...
“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.”
Faced with a looming exhumation of a loved one, a father and son contemplate their mortality. But in land-scarce Singapore, even the dead must make way for the living.
Chinese herbal medicines have a long and venerated history. We follow the forays of a "barefoot doctor" to the mountains to collect herbs in central Taiwan, and observe his religious practices to cure his patients using these herbal medicines as well as summoning spiritual forces. This film reveals the cultural and religious context of Chinese medicines—the intertwined dimensions of physical and spiritual energy that relate to human fate.
Today in the 21st century, "singing" is no longer just a purely musical act. It can represent the pulse of society and put contemporary ideas into practice. To raise awareness about energy issues, we adopted a documentary-style cinematic approach to follow musicians recording an album close to nature. Eleven Meinong Conversations invites music producer and singer-songwriter Wing Lo to return to his sunny hometown of Meinong, a historic Hakka settlement in Taiwan, and fulfil a ten-year musical dream. Lo transforms a solar-powered wooden guest house into a recording studio to record his dream album in his Hakka mother tongue. The film conveys the passion of Lo’s Hakka music and his love of living life close to nature. Through eleven seemingly daily conversations with different characters, Lo’s pure and carefree rural childhood, his nostalgia of leaving home, and his loss of a beloved family member, are transformed into timeless, radiant melodies that touch the heart.
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.
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.
From every November to the following February, indigenous migrant fishermen set up camp along Taiwan's Lanyang River to catch the season's first batch of eel fries. Camaraderie and bonds are forged between them as they survive the hardship together.
In 2020, the LGBTQ+ community in Taipei decided to host a pride parade during the COVID-19 pandemic, celebrating and marching for those who could not do it in their own countries.
Mrs. Lin has thousands of photos of herself and has photoshopped herself since half a century ago. She is Lien Lin, the Retoucher. This film is about her life as a female crafter as well as the vanishing art of retouching.
The tastes of the audience change rapidly, and in the end they are trapped in this trap of human civilization, exhausted, and even forget who they are...
In the Dabao River basin, where the Llyong Topa indigenous community used to be, stands a 'ghost temple' where hundreds of Atayal people were buried. They fell victims to Japanese government's first wave of indigenous genocide during its colonial rule of Taiwan. The massacre occurred much earlier than the Wushe Incident (1930), yet it is still rarely known to the world. The filmmaker visited the mountains over a hundred times, seeking clues to fill in the blanks of history.
This is a story on human desire and acrid smoke. When Myanmar opened its borders in 2010, there was an incursion of foreign capital into these unclaimed lands, with China the most aggressive of them all. Determined to also stake their claim within this fever rush of Chinese cash, Yung-heung and his comrades have set ablaze large swathes of forest alongside northern Myanmar to be turned into farmland.