Another wave of film festivals

November is autumn and the start of Taiwan's movie season. Raising the curtain for a string of movie events is The South Taiwan Film and Video Festival (南方影展), and the second anniversary film festival for SPOT -- Taipei Film House (光點台北).

Later this month, Nov. 24, there is the annual Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival (台北金馬影展), the biggest film festival of Taiwan. In December it is the Golden Horse Awards (金馬獎).

The South Taiwan Film and Video Festival starts next Tuesday in Kaohsiung and is a festival aiming to balance the fact that most art-house films are from Taipei.

Fifty feature-length films will be touring three south Taiwan cities -- Kaohsiung, Tainan and Chiayi. It can be seen as the largest film event in Southern Taiwan.

The main feature this year at the festival is its collection of Chinese independent movies made by young filmmakers, directors even younger than the so-called Gen Z filmmakers.

Incense (香火) by Ning Hao (寧浩) tells about a young monk's journey raising money in the city to repair an old and damaged Buddha statue.Good Morning Beijing (早安北京) by Pan Jianlin (潘劍林) is about an abduction one night in the back alleys of Beijing. Tang Poetry (唐詩) tells about a thief's personal transition after finding out he suffers from muscular dystrophy and is forced to change his "profession." Raw quality and low budgets are the main features of these Chinese independent movies.

The South Taiwan Film Festival will screen documentaries that have recently made headlines. Canadian director Atom Egoyan's Arayat, a drama looking at the historical truth of the Armenian genocide, and Blackboard, a humorous story about the deficit of education in Iran's mountain area, will both come back to the silver screen for southern Taiwanese movie fans.

Meanwhile, in Taipei, next Tuesday is also the opening day for a film festival -- the My Camera Film Festival (當我喊出開麥拉), celebrating the two-year anniversary of SPOT -- Taipei Film House.

The first feature of the festival is a mini retro screening of director Cheng Wen-tang's (鄭文堂) films. Cheng is a filmmaker who gained fame along with the growth of SPOT in the past two years.

His Venice film festival award-winning dramaSomewhere Over the Dreamland (夢幻部落) was premiered at SPOT two years ago. The mini retro will showcase Cheng's previous works, when he was a documentary maker in the 1980s and 1990s focusing on political issues and environmental protection.

The Days Without the Government (沒有政府的日子, 1987) tells about a 200-day long protest by employees of a chemical factory banding together because of the dumping of chemical waste into the nearby river. The Contract with Tso-shui River (濁水溪的契約, 1999) is a documentary dwelling on the past glory days of Taiwan longest river.

Another theme of the festival is to show the winning films of past winners at Taipei film festivals. Taipei Film Festival serves to discover talents among Taiwanese filmmakers.

The Taipei Film Awards have in the past two years become a dream award of young filmmakers seeking recognition apart from the more mainstream Golden Horse Awards.

But after winning the awards, most filmmakers find it difficult to screen their films because Taiwan is short of art-house movie theaters.

SPOT, as Taiwan's first arts movie theater, offers the opportunity for moviegoers to appreciate the independent spirit of the winning films.