Discoveries from Taiwan World Cinema

Obsessed with ballroom dancing, Summer tries to achieve her best with her coach Tony. They build a complex, passionate but finally transient relationship throughout the pas de deux dancing steps.

The social impact of gambling affected Taiwanese the mostduring the 80s in Taiwan. The concept of this film is to have audience experience and observe the social values of religion beliefs from a deity statue’s viewpoint through Virtual Reality technology.

At a remote all-girls school, an introverted teen uncovers a hidden tragedy as drowned students return as moisture-born spirits, haunting the living.

After leaving a youth shelter, a filmmaker lost in Christian faith tries to save his friend, who has turned to Satanism for redemption. Their shared need for salvation pulls them into a turbulent journey, testing their friendship and ultimately forcing them to make life-changing choices.

On the eve of the exam, Yuan You found Mu Hong and skipped class together, trying to escape from all the annoyance of the exam. Under the bridge pier, the two people's imagination and confusion about the future are intertwined...

A young man's girlfriend has disappeared without a trace. Confused, he tries to find her at the temple she mentioned the day before she disappeared. Once there, he meets a man selling fresh water and a shepherdess. As he chats with them about everyday things, he gradually begins to understand why his girlfriend left.

Follow a performance artist who refuses to be defined, drifting between landscape and memory, responding to identity and belonging through physical action.

Originally written by HUANG Hua-cheng in 1966, the script centres on the dialogue between a couple sitting in the audience of a play. 51 years later, original actors CHUANG Ling and LIU Ying-shang are invited back to the theatre to recreate the groundbreaking original.

An animated tale of how a family moved to Taiwan over a 5000 year journey.

A documentary short about a man attending WorldSkills.

In the 1980s, the small theatre movement took place in Taiwan. Jixing and Wang Mo-lin, the two main characters in the film participated in this non-mainstream, anti-government, and rather a radical movement, and thus memories have stayed deeply in their hearts. They witnessed the historic moment of the end of a long, nearly 40-year martial law.

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.

A young girl describes her father and his relationship with all his pets that he never really knew how to look after.

From the first minute to the last, from surreal, incongruous scenes to indigenous funeral ceremonies, from fish ponds to ruins, from women to men, from a telephone to a tortoise shell, from fortune-telling to Taoist salvation rites, from color to black and white, from Ma'nene to Family Constellations, from animals to being animalized, from sorrow to tranquility … Every image performs a death, releasing a vast vitality.

Bibi, wanting to comfort her childhood friend Chichi after his breakup, invites their mutual friend A-Fei to join them. The three of them chat while making dumplings, but in all the playful chaos, their cherished childhood keepsake—a heart-shaped stone ring—disappears. They search the entire living room but find nothing. They start to suspect that the heart-shaped stone might have been wrapped inside the dumplings. To make sure, Bibi and A-fei cook and eat the dumplings they had spent the entire afternoon making, leading to a heated argument with Chichi. In the end, they spend the entire afternoon in vain, leaving only three "dumplings" on the table.

The stubborn girl and the supernatural boy embark on a magical youth journey to find the ghost father who accidentally died! Whether we want to or not, whether we see ghosts or not, there are always some invisible and unspeakable ghosts closely following us... Perhaps falling in love is like being haunted by ghosts, so this "ghost" story and "love" story is staged lively.

A boy named Noddy, who likes to play games very much. His favorite is hide and seek because everyone likes it. But Noddy is always the first one to get caught. Every time he gets caught, he puts up a long face. Because once he gets caught, he can only stand aside and look at everyone else playing. Noddy hates to lose so he tries to observe carefully every time. Learn to run like everyone else, to cheat like everyone else, to fool around like everyone else and not to get caught. Gradually, Noddy plays hide and seek better and better. One day, he finds the safest place and hides inside quietly and patiently without making any noise. He sees other kids getting caught one by one. Noddy finally succeeds; no one can find him.

A single act of kindness, involving three DVD players, plunged a father and son into a fate they could never reverse. Like a sinking ship, they desperately tried to slow their descent, but ultimately could not overcome the water rising past their noses and throats.

Bo lin lives in the countryside, while Yu xin lives in the city. They are an eyesore to each other. However, on a stormy night, Bo lin's carelessness resulted in Yu xin getting lost. They went to a lot of trouble to find him! Upon returning home, they shared steaming hot typhoon noodles, a typical nickname for noodles in canned mackerel tomato sauce. This shared history not only brought them closer but also made them begin to accept each other.

In a city of endless deliveries, two thirty-year-old riders, one weighed down by debt and the other driven by hope, cling to a quiet yet enduring friendship as they dream of escaping a life caught in constant motion.

"Facing the stirrings of first love and growth, we all want to leave something behind, but in the end, everything moves forward silently." Hong Guang, who is about to enter junior high, spends the entire summer idly wandering around his mother's swimming pool. As the summer is about to end, the sudden appearance of a girl brings changes to Hong Guang's monotonous and stifling life, and certain feelings begin to quietly emerge in his heart.

As the sun sets over an Okinawan beach, penniless middle-aged Taiwanese priest Ching-wen meet Shizuko, a young Japanese woman gazing at the ocean. Drawn by her yearning for a love built on romance rather than convenience, Shizuko defies her parents’ wishes to marry into wealth and boldly pursues a relationship with Ching-wen. However, their May-December romance faces challenges beyond age, identity, and societal judgment. Beneath the surface lies a deeper obstacle rooted in Ching-wen’s past. On the beach where love both begins and ends, Shizuko and Ching-wen must confront the weight of history and personal trauma. Can their love transcend the barriers of age, culture, and a troubled past to endure?

When a prominent artist is raped without any memory of it, her husband resorts to vigilantism and sends their marriage to the brink of collapse.

Meet four Taiwanese women, the actual "leftover ladies" fighting to stay breathing in a somewhat stifling society. Since 2012, their friend in common, Chou Tung-yen, has been "stalking" them, capturing on film moments of these women's daily lives.

In the reasoning network , there are seven members who share the common interest of reasoning. One day, they decided to go snorkeling for vacation. Unfortunately, they have an accident and drifted to a desert island. On the island, everyone's cell phones' signals are gone, so they are forced to stay for seven days until the next ship comes. The first night, six of them have received the missing partner's slaughtered video message at 0:10 midnight. The coming week, one person is missing night by night. Can some of them survive from the desert island? Or all of them must die there? Who is the murder? "Killing 7" will have a surprise ending for the audience.

Tut is a 52-year-old fisherman living in Kampot. In spite of the language barrier, he recounts for the first time and without any words his past during the Khmer Rouge regime, demonstrating the torture he experienced in prison the year he turned fifteen.

23-year-old young artist aims to build a settlement in Central Taipei, offering the artists a place to work with total freedom. As a result, he sets up a tent on the Huashan Grassland and carries out an experimental project called the “120 Grassroots Self-Autonomous Zone.” As the settlement gets bigger and bigger, the Utopia gradually takes shape. Nonetheless, when the shocking murder and dismemberment of a woman happens on the Grassland, the authorities demolish the settlement and these young artists are chased out of the Grassland by the public opinion. Having experienced the rise and the fall of the 120 Grassroots Self-Autonomous Zone, where would this group of young people go as they are forced into exile?

In 1949, the Republic of China suffered a major defeat in the Chinese Civil War, and the Government was forced to relocate to Taiwan. The Government enacted the Declaration of Martial Law in Taiwan, prosecuted anyone who was suspected to be Chinese communists spy. Tin, an innocent farmer, was falsely accused and imprisoned. During the days in jail, Tin got lots of support from his inmate, Kok. With the hope that Kok gave him, Tin gradually found that it is impossible for him to be released from prison.

The story follows Chen Keran, a young man from the countryside who, due to a family crisis, moves to the city and falls in love with Xiao Lan, the daughter of a landlord, leading to a series of events filled with both joy and sorrow.

A do it in collective punk musical movie of sapphic/trans rebellion in which a troubled, young, non-binary Taiwanese named T, is in the grip of a heroin addiction. T meets Shui, a betel nut seller and daughter of a famous Taoist exorcist who wants to perform an exorcism on his daughter. They eventually encounter a character called Big Sister 13, and in a web of desires, neon lights, and songs, together they will fight against the destructive presence of addiction, a sinister creature, and a pro-family terrorist group. They will learn how to care for one another, exorcizing a haunted past and flowing into the immensity of love.

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.

A strange wind blew up the gate on the top floor. Jia-wei was stuck on the rooftop. He had to ask for help and get out as soon as possible. Otherwise, he would be late for the party with his girlfriend's family. He carefully prepared to leave a good impression on the parents of both parties, and his success would also be broken.

’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.

The second film in Huang Ya-Li's Sweet Potato trilogy.

After the mass distinction in the Anthropocene epoch, the Homo Sapiens Replacement Project (HSRP) is conducted to reserve human beings. The remaining human are assigned to reincarnate into reborns bio-technologically with formatted memories.

A beautiful young girl intrudes into the life of a married couple and while seducing each of them, she brings pleasures they have never experienced before. To her, it's all a game and doesn't realize the grave consequences it ensues.

This is a journey in which the creator of this documentary tries to find the origin for his creation. While driving on the freeway to Puzi, Chiayi County, WU Yao-tung and Tom continue a conversation left unfinished two decades ago. The dialogue falters; clearly they live in two different worlds. After traversing this journey for 20 years, the dark spectre entangled within the depths of the mind is never driven away.

The reunion of a man and a woman blurs the boundary between reality and memory.

In war-torn Myanmar, 2025, a bread factory trapped on the front line faces a power outage and an indifferent boss. As explosions draw near, the supervisor calls a vote: stay or flee. Some hold their ground, while others quietly depart—hope, fragile yet enduring, traced delicately in icing and flour.

Starring Chuang Ling and with cinematography by Hu Qi-Yuan, The Joy of Life consists of closeup shots of technically speaking only four simple gestures of pinching on a sugar cube, drinking coffee, lighting a match, and smoking a cigarette, and it is without any lines or specific plots.

A car accident leaves a 22-year-old young man bound to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. The elderly driver who hit him gives the family a house and pays monthly compensation, yet he still cannot forgive himself. The boy’s mother believes that as long as one is alive, there is hope. His unemployed father devotes himself entirely to caring for him. The physical therapist who guides his rehabilitation quietly falls in love with him. Because of the accident, the family begins gathering for dinner every night, finding a fragile sense of togetherness. But his perceptive younger sister knows the truth behind their beautiful new home: it was bought with her brother’s broken body.