Urban Nomad Film Fest (城市游牧影展) continues its partnership with Spring Scream (春吶音樂祭) with the underground film festival screening movies at a side stage for the third year.
In a prelude to the 10th edition of the main Urban Nomad at the end of this month, Urban Nomad at Spring Scream will serve as a laid-back video party at the campground in Oluanpi Lighthouse National Park.
According to its cofounder David Frazier (formerly a reporter at the Taipei Times), the festival will focus on animation and music videos.
Photo Courtesy of Urban Nomad
“The audiences will be overloaded with too much music,” Frazier said. “We want to provide something simple they can watch.”
Frazier intends to mix the short films from the Urban Nomad repertoire with music videos by bands playing at Spring Scream. He has 700 gigabytes of short films to choose from and intends to improvise partially. Three titles have already been short listed.
Abaddon is a 52-minute visual album produced by The Corrupted (Paul Kemp and Gareth Murfin). The film, which features non-stop mind-blowing animated images, was screened last year at Urban Nomad and caught the attention of Taiwan indie band Loh Tsui Kweh Commune (LTK, 濁水溪公社). The band’s lead singer Hsiao-ko (小柯) later commissioned The Corrupted to direct the music video for LTK’s 2010 single Take That, My Love (情人看刀).
Deathbowl to Downtown, directed by American documentary makers Coan Nichols and Rick Charnoski, chronicles the development of skateboarding through “street skating” in the 1990s.
Blood Shed is a horror short based on an article from the skateboard magazine Thrasher. The story follows a group of kids who skate at a house inhabited by a satanic cult, and then gleefully crashes into B movie delirium.
“There will be no plot and no emotional involvement,” Frazier promised. “It’s just a place for people to relax.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist