69 Matches Found
Follows the lives of two big stars in Taiwan. Since a failed spine surgery 40 years ago, Lee Pei-jing, known as the “Moon singer”, has been confined to a wheelchair. Actor Chang Feng is reaching one hundred years old. Tsai describes Chang as a tree, which looks ever more beautiful as it grows old.
Benjamin, who lives alone in Taiwan, has not returned to Hong Kong for two years due to the epidemic. Day after day boring and hard days, video chatting with his only relatives sister has become an important spiritual companion during this extraordinary period. Missing spread after a phone call..
During the soft lockdown, many people once again got back in touch with their lives: a girl shot videos everyday to share with the woman who was to be her mother, a father who finally has time for his cat, a teenager who has to graduate through videoconferencing, an individual quarantining alone at home, and a director whose new film was put on hold. Everyone grows and adapts to the new normal, and subsequently bids farewell to their old life.
Wen Jin-sheng loved being active from a young age. A motorbike accident during his junior year of high school left him with a comminuted fracture to the cervical spine, paralysis of four limbs, and only his head left to communicate with others. Jin-sheng has since spent 25 years lying in bed. Not only has his family suffered under the financial burden of his condition, but his life has also lost all direction and he has begun to contemplate euthanasia.
In Taiwan, director Lee Hsing's films have become a reflection of society and a collective memory of many. His dedication to film not only launched the careers of many movie stars and crew, but was also the foundation of the prestigious Golden Horse Awards. This documentary offers Lee Hsing's personal perspective on family, films, fate and beliefs, giving us a glimpse of the glory and rebirth of Taiwanese cinema.
In 2019, the night in Hong Kong was still in fascinating beauty and the landscape of everyday life was gradually changing. Travelling the streets, Tsai Ming-liang documented the city's rhythm and ambience, along with an overpass.
Taiwan is an island country. Although it is surrounded by the sea, its people fear the sea since the politics, the history and the religious beliefs held on this island make people turn their backs to the sea. Oceanic literature author Liao Hung-chi and underwater photographer Ray Chin lead the audience out to the sea and into the water. They prompt us to understand the sea and to think about the possibility that the ocean might become our lives and the future of our country.
The film follows the last 4 years life of Grandma Hashima, the last existent from colonial Taiwan, who knows the secrets of "Green Jail," the notorious coal mine before World War II on Iriomote Island, Okinawa, Japan.
This documentary explores the reason why people in Chiayi have an everlasting passion for music—is it the vibe of the city, or is it mere illusion? In this film, Chiayi-native musicians and musicians who have migrated to Chiayi were both actively engaged in a reality show in which they tried to fulfill their calling as musicians. Even faced with a dilemma, they have not hesitated for a second—music, for them, is the best choice in life.
Taste of Wild Tomato begins with the history of Kaohsiung, which was an important military base for the Japanese army during the Japanese occupation, and tends to the deep scars of the survivors, their descendants, and their descendants’ descendants.
The fierce and domineering Lee Volcano specializes in animal rescue and has lynched animal cruelty offenders. Some activists hate his style, but some supporters believe he has done justice to the ineffective animal protection laws.
In 2010, director Lin Cheng-sheng made Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, a documentary about autistic children and their teacher Han Shu-hua, who taught her young charges to express themselves through art. In this moving follow-up, Lin once again follows Han, who has since founded a shelter institute where autistic children can nurture their talents in painting and music. Because of their inability to effectively communicate their emotions and thoughts, people with autism can often be treated like outsiders. To inspire empathy for them, Lin made this moving documentary that embraces the diversity that these talented individuals and their stirring works of art bring to our lives.
In the middle of the strait between Kinmen and Xiamen, China, there are patches of sea filled with floating styrofoam and endless sand pilfering across the border. Huge business opportunities, and even greater land reclamations have scarred the beauty of the original rural landscapes for the sake of “ The Chinese Dream"—a dream that places economic achievements above all else.
On a winter night in 2002, a couple in their early 20s is breaking up atop a bridge, when the woman falls down. Is it a suicide or accidental death? The man asks a friend to call an ambulance, but the woman dies. The man and his friend are imprisoned for murder when an eyewitness reverses her original statement and says that she saw the two men throwing the woman from the bridge. After more than a decade, director Shih Yu-Lun collaborates with the ‘Taiwan Innocence Project’, a private organization that helps innocent people who have been unjustly convicted, to re-investigate the case.
If you are a woman who wants to have children, you are not allowed to have any assisted reproductive treatments in Taiwan unless you are married to a man. In 2019, Mota and City “were allowed” to become each other’s wives but they are still “not allowed” to have children. Despite the fact, they refuse to bow down to the law and have found a route not regulated by any laws just to fulfill their longing to become mothers.
Mori investigates the confluence of ecologies with place-based affectivities in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan. The title of the three chapters,“守(to protect)”、“森(forest)”、“杜(spirit)” are different in shapes and meaning, yet all pronounced as “Mori in Japanese.” Karst cave, groundwater, the soils, villager, burning mountain ritual, scientist, Buyō dancer, majestic oak and forest, the work questions the ways of contemplating nature through rituals and folklores, and how landscapes have been historically constructed. Conceptualizing Dan Graham’s installation “Two-way Mirror Triangular Pavilion with Shoji Screen” as diffractive model of the work, Mori sees landscape as process and inner mechanism, which is defined by our detached vision and interpreted by our bodymind. It is a panorama which continuously changes as we move along any route.
A documentary of the life story of a violent and bloodthirsty young man from Kachin, Myanmar, who casually discusses killing as if it were not his own story. His past of a non-voluntary, military life has cost him a great deal and completely changed his post-military life. With all the wounds and experiences, he is now considering which path to take for the future.
Huang Ming-chuan interviews female poets from Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, inviting them to speak about feminism, their social context and the role of poetry today.
The documentary follows the life of Ah-Tian's family over the course of 7 years and also shows the changes in Myanmar, the dangerous work at the jade mines, and the big rains every year which compel Ah Tian to come back home to look after his family. – MUBI
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 documentary short about a man attending WorldSkills.
Dance educator LIN Ssu-tuan is the first professional nude model in Taiwan in the 1950s and the 1960s, the muse for painters and sculptors in the art world, and the face for photographers’ salons around the world; in the end, she reversed the dynamics of the subject vs. the object and went on to perform her first solo modern dance in 1975, turning herself from the state of passiveness to an active educator of the art of dance. LIN is over 80 years old, but she still fervently pursues her ideals and passions with her body; her path of life is indeed a book of female art history that communicates with the society 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.
’Being fat’ often has negative connotations and is seen as a state that needs to be changed. Amy and Mallie suffered much frustration before learning to live in harmony with their bodies and advocating for body equality.
This is an 8mm and 16mm experimental film made during the year of Covid-19 around the time I moved back to Taiwan from Japan. I shot 8mm footage during the state of emergency in Japan and just after moving back to Taiwan. I then spent several months cutting and pasting each 8mm frame onto 16mm film. Sometimes the daily fragments were too sentimental, but the film gave me shelter.
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.
“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?
On the way up Yushan takes the journeys of Mr. Wu Rong-Fu and Mr. Lin Chang-An as the axes of narrative. The two individuals had some "modifying" on the top of Yushan. Their lives are intimately tied with Yushan. The personal narratives branched out along the way, the unexpected events on the halfway, and the anonymous landscapes, the mountain of memories via hands and materials as well as imaginations and recollections. Though they never meet, through the film, they'd have a chance to walk aside.
He has tattoos. He writes poems. He paints. He has done a few dirty jobs. When he was in prison for the second time, he received a literary award. He always looks for work, friends, love, but gets lost again and again... He is Weiming, a pen name he adopted when he was in junior high school.
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 documentary short about a man constructed facial mask map during the pandemic.
At the age of thirty, Lin got tired of the secure and yet repetitive life within the system. Therefore, she decided to leave her comfort zone and went to Nepal, firmly believing that what she wanted was to establish long-term collaboration with a local group in some place. Lin’s sensitivity and thoughtfulness led her to discover the difficulties and mistreatment brought upon the Nepalese women by menstruation, the local environment and the culture. As a result, Lin aimed to make changes by promoting cloth menstrual pads, the menstrual education and the environmental protection. She set up a workshop and hired the women in the village to produce cloth menstrual pads. By doing so, Lin has provided the local women with work and established a social enterprise of cloth menstrual pads.
"Relationships" is a documentary that explores modern relationships, including relationships, family, self, residence and technology. The film begins with a 51-year-old gay marriage from two countries. We interview sociologists about their views on marriage and bring out the possibilities of relationships, including LAT, open relationships, Norway's Sambo With Särbo and others, these challenge our imaginations of modern relationships. It further explores reconciliation with family, self-exploration, emotional education, co-living, and the interpersonal impact of technology.
Sculptor Tu-shui Huang (1895-1930) was way ahead of his time, combining traditional Chinese themes with Western influences that he learned while studying at the art academy in Tokyo. This earned him a reputation as the “founder of modern Taiwanese sculpture,” but he also drew criticism.
He has to leave the tribe for entering the next grade. This is a must challenge for the kids at the tribe. For YUKAN, besides this challenge. He still has to leave from his favorite mountain life. YUKAN’s ambition is to be a hunter from his childhood. Can he achieve his dream? The old spirits inside his heart will be obliterated gradually in the city life?
Day after day, bars of sunset pass the kitchen. Lamps carry on when the sky gets dark. The frame finds its balance. Life in work and work in life.
As a storied apartment complex awaits its eventual demolition, its inhabitants teeter on the edge of poverty in an invisible city hidden in plain sight.
Chi Chia-wei used to give away condoms during the 80s while dressing as Snow White, Jesus or the mummy. His activism received attention from the media and suffered discrimination from the general public. As a volunteer striving to make more people understand AIDS, he organized a press conference at which he came out, becoming the first person in Taiwan to do it. In 2017, a constitutional ruling made him a hero in the gay community. A 30-year struggle seemed to reach its final destination or a new starting point
In the 1990s, Chinese composer and educator Bao Yuankai began composing Western-style symphonic pieces rooted in traditional folk music. One of his acclaimed pieces is Sketches of Taiwan, which Bao was inspired to write after falling in love with Taiwan’s people and culture. Tsui Yung-Hui follows as he retraces his musical journey, decades-long love affair with Taiwanese culture and how he came up with brilliant, groundbreaking work that artfully bridges East and West.
Witness the first light and sounds of a new dawn breaking, as observed around the world one year ago. Patrick Shen’s cinematic meditation was created during the first COVID-19 lockdown by 35 artists from over 13 countries on May 3, 2020. With a soundtrack filled with environmental bird songs and ambient aural awakenings, the contemplative and collective portrait moves from darkness to light as a metaphor for hope and rebirth. 2020, United States, digital, nonverbal, 21 min.
With the form of remote audio conversation for its main narrative, the essay film consists of four chapters, each of which has its own focus but is also interconnected with each other. Blending voice narratives in four languages, moving images and literary texts, the film is mainly made from home video collections created in the 1990s from both filmmakers’ families, with home videos shot in the 1960s by a Hong Kong family as interludes. The film not only unfolds how East Asian families created their own image with amateur filming devices but also tells stories of migration, travelling, growing and familial relationships.
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.
A half-moon on the blue sky. A quiet offering connects the unreachable world with the physical ground. An elegy for the filmmaker's grandma.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
Bing-kun Su is destined to be a name that will be mentioned repeatedly in Taiwan's judicial history after the year 1986. Being in the environment of martial law, his family and career were destroyed overnight due to the flaws of judicial judgment. As the vindicator with the longest period of unjust imprisonment in Taiwan's history, Su was constantly dragged down by the injustice, together with his family. The lives of his wife and four children were turned upside down by this tragedy, forcefully changing their goal of life into "the reversal of Su's injustice case". The seemingly peaceful not-guilty justice buries the family's choice of life, with all these hidden costs that judicial compensation can never pay off, casting shadows over S and his family for a whole lifetime.
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.
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.
"Nan Xia the Tramping Tiger" used to be the favorite show of Zhu, Ching-Quei, the founder and first-generation director of Shinergy Puppet Show Theatre, as it has been a renowned masterpiece of this theatre for years. When Zhu Ching-Quei died from disease in 2015, his eldest son Zhu, Sheng-Chueh started to take the helm of theatre, but was faced with a dire crisis in the fast-changing world. Then his younger brother proffered an idea of using projection mapping to create the best ever Golden Light Puppet Show. Hence the two brothers are faced with a tug-of-war between tradition and innovation.
The Lighting aims to revisit issues of discrimination rooted in technological development and image production. Three professional Togolese photographers explore how to use instruments to compensate for insufficient exposure while shooting dark skin tones. A leading software engineer, developing facial recognition algorithms at Taiwan's MediaTek, talks about how a newly-created camera algorithm is very popular on the African continent.