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Anachronic Chronicles: Voyages Inside/Out Asia

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.​

Anachronic Chronicles: Voyages Inside/Out Asia

NR 2021
Umezawa Sutejiro and Chiayi Art Museum

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.

Umezawa Sutejiro and Chiayi Art Museum

NR 2021
A Letter to A'ma

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.

A Letter to A'ma

3.0 2021
Sounds of Taiwan: A Symphony by Bao Yuankai

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.

Sounds of Taiwan: A Symphony by Bao Yuankai

NR 2021
The Sick Rose

A time of crisis with a pandemic raging––these are dark days. Nevertheless, on a special errand, a little girl resolves to get through a city filled with viruses, made worse by people’s indifference. The little girl’s special errand is bringing her mother a magical rose. Her mother is courageously working in a hospital on the frontline against the pandemic. As with the battle against the pandemic out in the world, her journey is bumpy and frustrating but hope is never lost.

The Sick Rose

NR 2021
Shawty

Somewhere, an unassuming betel nut stand sits next to the bustling streets. There, a fair-skinned beauty named Nana tends to the shop. Many customers frequent the shop after carefully parking their cars, and yet some take far too long to come out for what should be a quick transaction. Even weirder is that often these customers come out with a dazed look on their faces, but with seemingly no purchase made and empty hands… One day A-YAO enters the shop after being persuaded by A-Hsing only to discover a hidden side to the normal-looking shop…

Shawty

NR 2021
The Dawn Chorus

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.

The Dawn Chorus

NR 2021
Étude

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.

Étude

NR 2021
On the Way Up Yushan

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.

On the Way Up Yushan

NR 2021
Thanks For Watching

"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.

Thanks For Watching

NR 2021
Where Can the Dust Alight

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.

Where Can the Dust Alight

NR 2021
Rock in Puppet

"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.

Rock in Puppet

NR 2021
SEA 404

SEA 404 is inspired by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto’s series Seascapes, and French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s essay The Vanishing Point of Communication. It questions the contemporary condition in which the computer mediates our experience, and parallels Sugimoto’s observation that media has transformed the way we see the world. In this film, the shift from the horizon line to the world of the onlooker is underlined by the sudden entrance of everyday sounds. The soundtrack is made from field recordings taken every morning at the same time and location for thirty consecutive days.

SEA 404

NR 2021
She heard nothing in Matsu. She heard everything.

“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?

She heard nothing in Matsu. She heard everything.

NR 2021
1975 of My Mother and Me

"1975 of My Mother and Me" is the final release of the series "Where Do You Come From." The series segments the artist's life experiences in different works featuring significant years. The previous three pieces are respectively about 1981, the year when he was born, 1990, in which his parents divorced, and the year of 2020 when his mother is living alone. "1975 of My Mother and Me" marks the year of 1975 when his parents got married. The artist explores the meanings of marriage and family in a retrospective way.

1975 of My Mother and Me

NR 2021
Mori

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.

Mori

NR 2021
The Filial Daughter

Professional mourning is a time-honoured tradition that is slowly dying out in Taiwan. Liu Jun-Lin is currently the youngest and one of the best-known professional mourners still working in Taiwan. The Filial Daughter captures her and her band's pre-funeral rituals and elaborate performances, which include acrobatic dance manoeuvres, sombre songs, theatrical elements and detailed choreography. The event is steeped in folkloric tradition yet wholly modern, featuring maximal lighting and pumped up PA systems.

The Filial Daughter

NR 2021