Following the unexpected box-office successes of Jump Boys (翻滾吧
The latest testimony to the growing importance of this genre is the Premier Documentary Festival (
The festival, featuring a diverse lineup of 40 acclaimed short and feature-length documentaries, will stop off at towns and cities across Taiwan starting Wednesday and finishing July 16.
"The general public still views documentary cinema as a monotonous and proselytizing medium," Lee Ya-mei (
The films were selected according to their production values and substantiality, and will be presented in five sections: Golden Horse Awards Retrospective; Winners of Taipei Film Festival; Rhythm of Life; New Wave, New Way; Director in Focus: Yang Li-chou.
In the first two sections, audience members will have the chance to review the cream of the crop of Taiwanese documentaries such as A Secret Buried for 50 Years - A Story of Taiwanese Comfort Women (
New Wave, New Way consists of documentaries from a new generation of filmic talents that is breaking free from the didactic traditions of Taiwan's documentary cinema and injecting the medium with more creative license. The award-winning short documentary My 747 (我的七四七) is up-and-coming director Hou Ji-ran's (侯季然) study of Taipei city narrated through his beaten-up scooter, while BARK: Part 1 of Crouching Dog, Hidden Chicken (狗跳雞飛之一:狗幹) presents a quirky tale featuring freelance debt collectors.
After receiving critical acclaim for Jump Boys, director Lin Yu-xian (
Also leaning toward the experimental end of the cinematic spectrum is director-in-focus, Yang Li-chou (
Besides the free screenings at colleges and community centers, those who are interested can also take advantage of Chunghwa Telecom's Multimedia-on-Demand service and watch the documentary programs on its broadband network until mid-June.
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