Tickets now available for Women Make Waves fest

Now in its ninth year, the Women Make Waves Film and Video Festival (女性影展) has become the soapbox of local women filmmakers and unconventional films with a female perspective.

Taking place from Sept. 13 to Sept. 20, this year, the festival will showcase 52 films from 10 countries, including this year's Sundance Film Festival-winner, Daughter from Danang; Japanese female porn director Hamano Sachi; and a special feature on German filmmaker Monika Treut, with her seven works focused on and challenging the concepts of gender and sexuality. Advance tickets are available starting today and, given the festival's past popularity, buying early is recommended.

Daughter from Danang is set against the backdrop of the orphan and baby lift that followed the end of Vietnam War. The film focuses on about Heidi Bub's journey to reunite with her mother in Vietnam after 22 years of separation. Japanese filmmaker Hamano Sachi gained fame in Japan as a pioneering female porn director. Since the mid 1970s, Sachi has made more than 300 films portraying sexuality from a women's perspective. This year's festival will present two of her films: Lily Festival, about a group of aging women who live together and the antics that ensue when a 75-year-old Don Juan shows up, and In Search of a Lost Writer, which explores a female Japanese writer's secretive emotional world.

Local women filmmakers are also making a strong showing at this year's festival. Lin Hsiao-fang's (林筱芳) Foreign Brides in Meinung is a documentary researching Indonesian women who marry Taiwanese men in the rural village of Meinung. Lin follows the women from their Chinese classes to their hometown in Indonesia, showing the third-world condition from whence they came.

Narrative filmmakers include Chou She-wei (周旭薇) and Yu Sen-I (俞聖儀), graduates of New York University's film program. Both of them have been past participants in previous Women Make Waves festivals. Chou's Neither...Or (管...或是) tells about an encounter between a housewife and a 10 year-old boy wandering the streets. It's a subtle and touching film depicting a middle-aged women's self-awakening by helping troubled kids in the community. Yu's Acupuncture Girl (針灸女孩) is about the bizarre love fantasy of a young women who works in a Chinese medical clinic in New York, who has an affair with a man who loves all things Oriental.

Tickets cost NT$150 and are available through Acer ticketing outlets by calling (02) 2570-4890. For your information, visit their Web site at www.wmw.com.tw.