For a testament to the presence of underground amateur film talent in Taipei, as well as to the concept that almost anyone can make movies now with a Guanghua-market PC and a cheap handycam, look no further than the Urban Nomad film festival, which starts today and runs through Sunday. The event screens a selection of short films by expat and local filmmakers that, while often extravagantly lo-fi in their production, are a refreshing break from the earnestness of Taipei's other film festivals.
This year, the organizers have tightened up their programming to cut down on the genuinely bad movies that have marred previous Urban Nomads and selected the choice cuts from among the movies submitted. They also solicited films from abroad and at colleges in Taiwan. So, this year's lineup of movies will try to balance the quirkiness of amateur alternative film with some near-professional level films to make the audience feel like their NT$200 wouldn't have been better spent on the latest Hollywood schlock flick.
A sneak preview of a handful of the scheduled movies shows plenty of promise. Tomorrow's digital shorts category will include former Taipei resident Jay Spieden's gory animation Choppy the Chimp and Les Arthur's Street Pong. In this second movie, two ping-pong players wheel their table through the streets of Taiwan to play in some random locations like in front of a Family Mart and eventually end up on a beach with the tide coming to add tension to their dramatic match point. It's not brilliant, but it's fun.
PHOTO COURTESY OF URBAN NOMAD
Norman Szabo's Dignity, which also screens tomorrow in the same category, enjoys some surprisingly good acting from local expats, as does TC Lin's spy thriller Clay Soldiers. Lin's film was submitted to the ladyxfilms.com film project that collects amateur spy flicks from around the world, and, in keeping with the genre's tradition, there are mysterious and ravishing ladies, a secret disc and a high-speed chase with bullets flying.
In tonight's program, two of the films previewed that are worth cheking out are The Locust, which is basically a music video for the LA band by the same name, and The Varieties of Romantic Experience, a short by Northwestern University film student Dan Freed shot with professional actors.
The highlight of the festival will be Sunday's screening of Aza Jakob's feature film Nobody Needs to Know, which has a synopsis on the film's own Web site that is entirely incomprehensible, but suggests a theme that explores the notion of the camera -- both the closed-circuit and the film kind -- as a tool of control. Part of the festival's program will be a free workshop tomorrow at Huashan Arts District by Ulead software company to tutor amateur filmmakers in its editing software.
PHOTO COURTESY OF URBAN NOMAD
PHOTO COURTESY OF URBAN NOMAD
Has the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) changed under the leadership of Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌)? In tone and messaging, it obviously has, but this is largely driven by events over the past year. How much is surface noise, and how much is substance? How differently party founder Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) would have handled these events is impossible to determine because the biggest event was Ko’s own arrest on multiple corruption charges and being jailed incommunicado. To understand the similarities and differences that may be evolving in the Huang era, we must first understand Ko’s TPP. ELECTORAL STRATEGY The party’s strategy under Ko was
It’s Aug. 8, Father’s Day in Taiwan. I asked a Chinese chatbot a simple question: “How is Father’s Day celebrated in Taiwan and China?” The answer was as ideological as it was unexpected. The AI said Taiwan is “a region” (地區) and “a province of China” (中國的省份). It then adopted the collective pronoun “we” to praise the holiday in the voice of the “Chinese government,” saying Father’s Day aligns with “core socialist values” of the “Chinese nation.” The chatbot was DeepSeek, the fastest growing app ever to reach 100 million users (in seven days!) and one of the world’s most advanced and
It turns out many Americans aren’t great at identifying which personal decisions contribute most to climate change. A study recently published by the National Academy of Sciences found that when asked to rank actions, such as swapping a car that uses gasoline for an electric one, carpooling or reducing food waste, participants weren’t very accurate when assessing how much those actions contributed to climate change, which is caused mostly by the release of greenhouse gases that happen when fuels like gasoline, oil and coal are burned. “People over-assign impact to actually pretty low-impact actions such as recycling, and underestimate the actual carbon
Before the recall election drowned out other news, CNN last month became the latest in a long line of media organs to report on abuses of migrant workers in Taiwan’s fishing fleet. After a brief flare of interest, the news media moved on. The migrant worker issues, however, did not. CNN’s stinging title, “Taiwan is held up as a bastion of liberal values. But migrant workers report abuse, injury and death in its fishing industry,” was widely quoted, including by the Fisheries Agency in its response. It obviously hurt. The Fisheries Agency was not slow to convey a classic government
RSS