Discoveries from Taiwan World Cinema

Through conversations with his grandparents, the director uncovers family conflicts from 60 years ago and reflects on how life choices shape perspectives on aging and living. The film delves into the causes and consequences of choices, exploring themes of helplessness and resilience. Woven through memories, it reveals the complexities of life’s final stages and the pursuit of meaning.

The analogue film maps our perception of the environment and how we relate to it through different perspectives and the influence of various changes. Do we perceive the city – the space we have been familiar with – in the same way when we look at it in hindsight from a plane window or watch it in a shaky 8mm video?

"The Chair" comes from an idea I had when I was little. I went outside to collect a lot of discarded cables and stealthily pulled out Mercedes-Benz badge from a Benz car. Later, I went home and put the chair upside down, decorating it with cables and the badge. I sat in the chair for a whole night. At that moment I believed that I had made a time machine. The event has been hovering around my mind for a long time. The desire of being an artist perfectly motivates me to do this work again. The chair may be a real time machine. At least through the process of reproduction, it connects my childhood and the present. By means of being positioned as an art work, the trip from my studio to the gallery literally becomes my time travel in reality. In this work, I am always interested in the part of A-side. In fact, it is the making of C-side, which comprises barren routine and unnecessary events. I want this kind of boring video.

The man intends to kill another man. While waiting for the man to get off work, he was witnessed by another man. The first man killed his target, completely seen by the second man. The second man told the first man that he saw it without missing a single glance.

Here is only one chance in life, and the way of education has a profound impact on the future of children; letting children go to school at home is a challenge and an experiment that does not allow failure... This film visits four families who have completely different backgrounds but also choose to teach themselves. Through the sharing of experiences between their children and their parents, it presents the appearance of the phenomenon of self-study in Taiwan today. Is the pursuit of the happy growth of one's own children contradictory to the hope that the children will become a dragon and a phoenix? What kind of learning environment should we prepare for children? How do families with different backgrounds and children with different qualifications choose appropriate education methods? What is best for children?

We experience a lot of poems as a record of real life. Through the specific Taiwanese backdrop, the poetry film illustrates a series of moments to approach the concept of time, which is not as concrete as we are taught. As a poet, the filmmaker presents her ideas on the nature of reality, existence, what is there and what is not there.

On January 1, 2003,President Chen Hsui-Bian declared:" I have felt the people's anguish and pain, and would like to express my gratitude and best wishes to the hard-working people of Taiwan and their unrelenting strivings."

Fu-Jia the farmer grows lemons on a riverside flood-land. He borrowed a camera in 2009, saying that he would make a documentary on why the market price for lemons remains low. Not even a month later, Typhoon Morakot caused havoc in Taiwan, resulting in the largest flood in 50 years. Fu-Jia then documented the devastation with his camera. Upon learning Fu-Jia's story, we decided to make a documentary entitled "Fu-Jia's Home Movie" –about the man who has been making a documentary.

A bedridden husband and his deranged wife live in a shabby old mountainside house. One day, the bored wife goes out to collect trash. As she passes by a deserted cemetery and ruin, she comes across a mirror and takes it home. The mirror connects the past with the present. The bedridden husband can see the reflection of the yellowed photos on the wall in the mirror, prompting him to reminisce about his past affairs during the Japanese rule. One day, the wife ventures out again and encounters a nightmarish air raid…

Due to his injury, 30-year-old ballet dancer LIANG Shih-huai is forced to put his dance career on hold. While nursing his body through recovery, Shih-huai retraces his tenacious pursuit of ballet from Taiwan, U.S., South Korea, to New Zealand, and he carefully thinks through the options available at this pivotal moment in his career. Ballet in Tandem centers on Shih-huai’s journey in dance and compares it with different generations of Taiwanese dancers’ quest for perfection in Western classical dance. Through these stories, this films questions the decision-making process in Taiwanese education system and in other related social institutions, challenges the stereotypical perceptions of the art form, and explores more possibilities for dance, art, and culture in Taiwan.

Through first person narration, Tari reveals personal stories related to her decision to work in Taiwan, her strained family relationships, the risks involved in working abroad and the traps she has fallen into.

Can both your parents with mental disorders affect you being a teacher?

After 30 years of Cold War confrontation between Taiwan and the mainland, people-to-people exchanges began in the 1980s, and the increasingly close economic, trade, and tourism exchanges over the past 30 years have roughly changed the external appearance of the two sides, but the internal alienation and mistrust have never diminished... Lao Ke, a businessman who failed to do business in Taiwan, put down his body and went to the mainland to serve as a Taiwanese officer, wanting to make a comeback. Lili, a working girl from the Mainland to Shenzhen, met her husband in Taiwan through the Internet and wanted to pursue a better life. They landed on the other side full of hope. Unexpectedly, the treacherous and changeable external situation and internal conflicts that appeared from time to time made the road to dream building extremely difficult.

Brother Wang and Brother Liu Walk Hades

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.

Illusion, Karma, Apocalypse, Autism. A passenger finds himself being trapped inside a game of gods.

An unfinished housing complex has been abandoned. The imagined future from the past is taken over by foliage and wildlife.

Yong-shun, in order to pay off his debts when he was young, he started a life of driving a ready-mix truck during the day and working as a logistics truck driver at night. He has a not-so-mentioned twin brother, Yong-ho. In the early years, he and his brother became partners and engaged in driving logistics trucks together, but everything ended in 1998 due to a traumatic accident. The accident also caused his mother to stop seeing him. Yu-xuan, since he was a child, his father and uncle would take him with them when they drove the logistics truck. His father died at work when he was in junior high school, and now he has chosen the same job as his father, intending to continue his father's unfinished drive.

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.

This film mainly features two friends of the artist. One works in an empty 85-story skyscraper. The other is a student who has participated in left-wing movements and anti-globalization activities for many years. Through these two friends’ situations in life, the work reflects the dreams and illusions of Taiwan during its process of ‘modernization’, and the irresolvable struggle between different national ideologies in local Taiwanese politics.

This film was made in the Bade Area of Taoyuan County, Taiwan. Chen Chieh-jen invited local temporary laborers to wander around the area, and enter office buildings and factory spaces that had been sealed off by the courts due to property right disputes. Examining the objects left behind in these spaces from the viewpoint of these temporary laborers, it muses on the voids and landscapes left behind in Taiwan amidst the torrent of globalization.

This two part documentary film, "+ two degrees Celsius -- the Truth Formosa (Taiwan) Must Face" focuses on the effects of climate change in Formosa (Taiwan) produced by famed Formosan (Taiwanese) Television host Sisy Chen.

The soldier's written words breathe life into the desolate and shell-covered Tong-Sha Island, transforming it into a vivid landscape. It's a place where many men seem symbolically bound, unvisited yet too precious to forsake.

The pandemic-born “emo rave”-categorised “Change, Reset ft. PRINCI” portrays how distressed human beings lean on their desire for intimacy and connection on chat apps, without any physical interaction. The personality-training AI chatbot app “Replika” and dating app “Tinder” specifically, became the inspiration for this music video. The First-Person point of view coupled with a “Pokémon GO”-like AR interface fills this journey with sorrow and uncertainty. As the story starts with a user (Sonia Calico) who refuses to update her AI chatbot (PRINCI), she desperately ventures to find the AI partner’s crystal avatar in limited time as the obsolete-version of the world around them starts to fall apart.

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.

This film is based on concepts of panic attacks and ornithophobia. The girl suffers from a feeling of great discomfort that comes without warning, like an uncontrollable disaster. When the panic is accompanied by a flapping of wings, a chaotic, dissociated journey into her unconsciousness begins.

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.

My sister Pei-ling went through with an unexpected pregnancy. The child was nicknamed Angoo. In three years, Pei-ling broke up with the child's father, met a new boyfriend, left Angoo in my parents’ care to move in with her boyfriend, until she finally moved back in with our family due to the disapproval of her boyfriend's brother. The parent-daughter relationship was strained at first, but gradually things changed; understanding and love returned between them.

In 1999, the Indigenous Culture Club at the National Taiwan University held a series of annual ceremony activities as a tribute to traditional indigenous rituals. Unfamiliar with their native languages and cultures, however, the student organizers found themselves in an awkward position that brought them into conflict with the school administration. Where would they find the “salt”, an in-depth understanding of their cultural identities and backgrounds?

The camera zooms in to its ultimate to the sky and catches what we can’t see with our naked-eye: noise, space, moonlight, and waves.

I tried to discuss the stirring and emotional states in human life, like a touch or a physical state of behavior. We expose ourselves to a vast event that creates a state of smallness and vulnerability, We are so vulnerable, so powerless to extend our thoughts or intentions.

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.

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.

A story about memories.