Religion has been accorded a slot at this year's festival. Cannes-winning Silent Light by Mexican director Carlos Reygadas will show. Russian soul, as revealed with lucidity by the cinematic great Andrei Tarkovsky, sees a lyrical revival in The Banishment by Andrey Zvyagintsev, whose first film The Return won the Golden Lion at the 2003 Venice Film Festival.
Promising young blood in the world of cinema can be found in the international digital shorts competition. Twenty-seven works, selected from 785 entries, probe the digital realm inhabited by the weird, subversive and fantastical.
Section highlights include Annecy International Animation Festival winner, The Pearce Sisters, a black comedy on sisterhood in 2D and 3D animation; Machine from Spain, which tells a dark, disturbing tale about a woman's transformation after being violated; and Ark, a Polish computer-generated animated work about the remaining human population's search for an uninhabited land after a devastating epidemic.
Local talent
Turning to Taiwanese cinema, talented female director Singing Chen (陳芯宜) applies magical realism to a biting study on a society in chaos in God Man Dog (流浪神狗人), which follows several parallel story lines. Taking on the imaginary, local directors are beginning to explore fantasia flicks. Brotherhood of Legio (神選者) by Aozaru Shiao (蕭力修) takes cues from video games to portray five young people's adventure in a game of survival.
Nominated for the best feature film at this year's Golden Horse Awards, actor-turned-director Doze Niu's (鈕承澤) debut, What On Earth Have I Done Wrong?! (情非得已之生存之道), is a mockumentary about a filmmaker's project to record his political fantasies.
Several retrospectives pay tribute to Taiwanese filmmakers. One commemorates the recent passing of Edward Yang (楊德昌), a leading Taiwanese New Wave filmmaker. The must-sees of the collection are the four-hour director's cut of A Brighter Summer Day (牯嶺街少年殺人事件) and Yang's last work Yi Yi: A One and a Two (一一), which premiered seven years after its completion.
Others mark the 10th anniversary of the deaths of director and Golden Horse Award-winner Richard Li Han-hsiang (李翰祥) and King Hu (胡金銓), a filmmaker of the Shaw Brothers era. The section on Hu features the director's martial-arts classics that mix elements from dance, music and theater while the Li retrospective will screen At Dawn (破曉時分) and The Winter (冬暖), two of the top 10 movies in Taiwanese film history.
All three masters' film manuscripts, hand drawings and family and production photographs have been assembled for a rare exhibition at Shin Kong Museum (新光美術館) on Dunhua South Road (敦化南路) that runs through the end of next month.
Panel discussions by film critics and professionals from home and abroad will also be held during the period of the festival.
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