Discoveries from Taiwan World Cinema

Lok and Sok are two brothers in arms who came to Taipei together to make their fortune. Lok is tall, handsome and a ladies' man, while Sok is an ordinary, honest chap. The girl Sok has his heart set on, Xiao Wen, has fallen for Lok instead. How can they stop this womaniser from hurting Xiao Wen's innocent heart? The names Lok and Sok, phonetically similar to ‘lok-kò-sok-kò’ (meaning trivial matters), hint that this is a light-hearted romantic comedy.

A pineapple stings a child’s tongue, accompanied by a child’s perspective glimpsing tough family issues.

A brief cinematographic exploration on Super8 that examines Taiwan's complex national identity through the prism of political utopia. Shot in emblematic locations such as the Legislative Yuan, Liberty Square, the National Human Rights Museum, 228 Memorial Park, and TSMC headquarters, the film juxtaposes these symbols of democracy and autonomy with monuments from the authoritarian past like the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and Cih-hu Memorial Statue Park. Through these evocative images, the film reflects on the historical, diplomatic, and geopolitical tensions that have defined Taiwan for many centuries and specially since 1949, when the Kuomintang established its government on the island following the Japanese surrender in 1945. This work explores the Taiwanese paradox: a nation functioning as a sovereign democracy while navigating a diplomatic limbo, pursuing a political utopia where its self-determination might be fully recognized.

Movies are a window on the world. In the 1990s, Taiwan-produced motion pictures did well at international film festivals. This has not only familiarized audiences around the world with the richness of Taiwan movies; it has allowed them to see Taiwan's growth. This presentation focuses on two stages of Taiwan movies: the pluralistic creativity of the 1990s, and the beginnings and foundation-building of the 1980s. It introduces contemporary directors of the time and their works to take viewers back to an enthusiastic and energetic era. It describes the relationship between cinema and social development, and explores the mutual reliance of the aesthetic of realism and social thought. Wave after wave of developments in Taiwan New Cinema occurred in the 1980s and 90s.

In a small village in Tainan, the ritual dance-music tradition “Seven Echoes” survives as both spiritual offering and cultural memory. Through voice-over narration and archival detail, the film traces how this art form is woven into temple festivals, agrarian life, and communal identity — even as modernity threatens its continuity.

Ting-ying was diagnosed with a brain tumour. After years of pain, she wrote to Dignitas, a Swiss assisted dying organization, for help. Through 93 letters, she navigated her way toward assisted death, torn between love from her family and partner, and the unbearable pain.

The film begins with a conversation with the grandmother, tracing back the gentle, intricate, bittersweet, and hard-to-express emotions between mother and daughter. It moves between the reality of daily life and the imagined scenes from memories.

A woman goes on nightly trips, in search of someone who has departed. One night, she has an unusual encounter. This film delicately explores cultural differences and the universality of the unspeakable grief, from Taiwan to Sweden.

YOSHIKAWA Hayao (1890-1959), pioneer of amateur cinema in Asia, authored over 160 books to share his passion during the 1930s. Years later, he rediscovered a forgotten dream from his youth: to create a sci-fi film set on the Moon.

The girl arranged to meet the boy at the familiar sports field. The two of them walked along the lanes, talking about the blurry present and the past, trying to untangle the faint, almost intangible tension between them…

Immature is an animated documentary that explores the fluidity and complexity of gender identity through bodily imagery. Shaped by memory and imagination, it presents an intimate dialogue within the body. Fluid, fragmented, and ever-reforming, the film traces an ongoing journey of exploring gender, sexuality, and selfhood.

Portraits:Taken from Our Days is a personal and family-centered film, built from fragments of daily life and letter exchanges with my father. Through these intimate recordings, I explore shifting family relationships, unstable living environments, and my own psychological states. By revisiting family archives, I attempt to reconstruct an image of “home” from scattered memories.

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.

She moves to Taipei with her mother. years later, she runs away, and returns to her childhood home.

A college student unexpectedly inherits a car left by his father—along with a huge debt. To pay it off, he's forced to put his studies on hold. Driving this car that links two generations, long-avoided family issues quietly start to surface.

Childhood is a dagger lodged in the throat. Spending childhood under the pressure of academic success, there was no happiness to be found. It wasn't until I grew up and started filming my family that I discovered my mother's body and mind had long aged and shattered. As my heart broke with each merciless verbal attack, who could return to my mother her lost youth? A mother and daughter, loving and clashing, after over twenty years together, finally willing to face the long-standing issues between them.

Plot details under wraps but "aims to fuse high-octane action with comedy while celebrating cultural diversity across its Middle Eastern and Taiwanese settings".

The protagonists of the film are are siblings whose mother, Euis, gave up her dreams as a young girl due to financial difficulties and came to Taiwan to work as a migrant laborer before eventually marrying and settling down. Now, as the siblings’ dreams begin to take root, they navigate the cultures of Indonesia and Taiwan, transitioning from childhood to adolescence—a journey from which there is no turning back, marked by a unique cross-cultural experience of growing up.

Blue Sun reflects on the 1984 mining accidents in Northern Taipei and their enduring impact. Inspired by the works of Taiwanese novelist Tong Wei-Ger, the performance explores how these events continue to shape memory and identity.

A hired fist shares the bizarre encounter that led to his retirement.

When stress piled up, the bullied boy turned his gaze onto weaker beings to bully, not realizing that he himself was turning into the kind of person he dreaded the most.

Four men enter a bidding match for an everyday item, a pencil. All of them would go to extreme lengths to acquire it.

Uncle Sheng has been as a fisher for his whole life. After retirement, he felt lost. One day, he decided to go with his old pal onto the boat.

Kuan has to straighten his naturally born curly hair with a hair straightener before school everyday. But due to the raining season...

Lovers Journey

Joe is a young woman who has left Taipei for Paris to forget her ex-girlfriend, Jenny. Unfortunately, even on the other side of the world, she still thinks about her. One day, Jenny's friend Min arrives in Paris. She brings Joe a present from Jenny. Jenny, who has rebuilt her life and recently got married. Joe and Min spend several days visiting the French capital, Min systematically forgetting to bring Joe the gift. When she finally thinks of him, Joe is left with a locked padlock and a missing Min...

Child Portrait is a mirror that presents life from multiple perspectives, reflecting the various relationships between the self and others, and the issues that come with different emotions. Painting is not simply a thinlayered medium presenting one's skills, but an art of deep understanding and acceptance. The painting throws out questions, and I walk into the world of the painting with my camera to find answers with the painter across time and space.

Structured around a dancer's routine, the film unfolds in four stages: hope, fear, anger, and longing for stability. It interweaves these emotions with those of locals of Matsu, the military, and first-time-visiting photographers from Taiwan island.

Integrating home movies shot over six years of traveling with friends and lovers with postcards and flyers collected during past travels, Wu Chun-Hui takes us on a journey without end, a voyage searching for the origin of memory and infinite desire. Noah, Noah deals with relationships, distance, and memories, and turns the needs and desires that evolve from them into a cinematic experience. Trains departing, back roads roamed, navigating by water or air. It’s also about distance in filming, a distance from one image to another film roll, from one frame to another perforation, the distance from the real to the faded memory.

Focused on the 2018-2020 excavation of Todos los Santos Church on Heping Island, Taiwan, this film delves into maritime exploration and colonisation of Taiwan. The director combines archaeological findings with a cross-disciplinary musical performance, capturing the delicate excavation process. Furthermore, the film traces a creative journey from the site to historical events in Asia.

A girl has her slipper stolen by a crab on the beach. In the process of recovering it, she learns a valuable lesson about cherishing the little things in life.

An episode of “Urban Horror”

Wracked with the guilt of his wicked past, Tai Pang changes his name and tries to make a new start in life. But others cannot forget and he is forced to defend himself for his past transgressions.

We encountered the dogs on the forays through Pristina’s streets. At night, we melded into the canine throngs, shadowing their movements until they dispersed and vanished. The residents imparted a saga of these dogs: in the late 1990s, as Serbian troops and Albanian insurgents clashed, domestic dogs were cast adrift on the battleground streets. Ever since, Pristina has been a tableau of roaming dog packs, with sporadic human-dog confrontations.

It is a documentary on food design, redefining food through the lens of creativity and design. The film features interviewees from Italy, Spain, Taiwan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

This film is a montage of the best footage Green Team collected from major social movements, including environmental, political, human rights, indigenous, student, farmer and labour movements, displaying the uproar in the period prior to and after the lifting of martial law. However, right after its completion, the 20th May Incident occurred, preventing it from ever reaching the public.

The 80-year-old grandfather is suffering from senile dementia and his mental age has degraded to only 5 years old. Sometimes, he groans and talks to the air at home. There’s nothing much we could do. He seems to live only in his dream and gets deeper and deeper….

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 runaway tomb on its journey represents a nomadic existence. Life is like a road trip that eventually leads to rebirth for all. Have a good death.