Over the past decade, the Urban Nomad Film Festival has brought some of the most exciting and thought-provoking indie films from around the world to Taipei. Now in its 11th edition, the event runs from Thursday to April 22 at Huashan 1914 Creative Park (華山1914). Films will cover topics ranging from writer William S. Burroughs to Filipino exploitation movies.
Though this year’s theme is ostensibly art and technology, Urban Nomad founders David Frazier and Sean Scanlan seek a broad range of submissions every year. Since launching in 2002, Urban Nomad has cultivated a youthful audience filled with socially aware, culturally savvy viewers.
Culture, technology and activism “are the three really big areas that are happening in terms of documentary right now,” says Frazier. “We’ve found a really awesome audience for these films in Taiwan. I don’t know if it was so obvious before we started showing these kinds of movies.”
Photo courtesy of Urban Nomad
This year’s festival starts on Thursday next week with The Taiwan Oyster, a US feature-length drama directed by Mark Jarrett, who lived in Taichung from 1999 to 2001. Two expat English teachers steal the body of a coworker after he dies in an accident and travel with it across Taiwan, determined to give their former colleague a proper burial and make it to Spring Scream on time.
“It is the first film that talks about what it is like to be an English teacher here, what it is like to consider life and death, and the reality of making your home in a foreign country. And it is totally about Taiwan,” says Frazier.
“If you look at Taiwanese cinema, it is all very much in the eyes of the Taiwanese. So to see a foreign director come here and produce a different interpretation of this country is very interesting and also needed,” he adds.
Photo courtesy of Urban Nomad
Singaporean director Tan Siok Siok’s (陳惜惜) Twittamentary, which screens on April 22, offers viewers an interactive experience. The film originated as a crowd-sourcing experiment in which Twitter users were invited to contribute story ideas, videos and other media. Tan then took a road trip across the US to interview users of the microblogging platform, including a homeless woman, a prostitute who uses Twitter as a personal “GPS” and Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington. The film will be shown in dual screen mode with a “live” Twitter wall that users can contribute to using the hashtag #twittamentary.
Other films in this year’s lineup include Morgan Spurlock’s latest documentary The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, which tackles the ubiquity of product placement, marketing and advertising in US culture.
Recommended to Frazier by an Urban Nomad audience member, Kinshasa Symphony is about Central Africa’s only symphony orchestra, based in the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The German documentary, which will be shown on April 22, follows the lives of the musicians, many of whom are self-taught, as they live among the 10 million inhabitants of one of the world’s poorest cities. Directed by Claus Wischmann and Martin Baer, Kinshasa Symphony has already won more than 15 awards at film festivals across the world.
Photo courtesy of Urban Nomad
Australian director Mark Hartley pays tribute to Filipino genre movies of the 1970s and 1980s in Machete Maidens Unleashed! Cheap labor, exotic scenery and non-existent health and safety regulations created an anything-goes environment for exploitation filmmakers, including cult movie icons like Roger Corman, Joe Dante, John Landis, Sid Haig and Eddie Romero, all of whom are featured in interviews in the film. Machete Maidens Unleashed! screens on April 16 and April 21.
Other festival movies focus on art and culture, including Lemmy, a 2010 documentary about Motorhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister, Jean Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone and PressPausePlay, a Swedish film that asks if the digital democratization of culture has really resulted in better art, film, music and literature.
Viewers interested in activism and social justice may find the following films noteworthy: If a Tree Falls, a 2012 Oscar nominee for best documentary that examines the fringe of American’s environmental movement; We Were Here, about the onset of the HIV/AIDS crisis in San Francisco’s gay community and how it helped turn the fight for gay rights into a bona fide political movement; GrowthBusters, in which director and activist Dave Gardner argues that urban growth and uncontrolled development in the US has led to a lower standard of living for Americans; and the 2011 French documentary Greenpeace: The Story.
Photo courtesy of Urban Nomad
This year, viewers can enjoy Urban Nomad’s short film happy hour for free with a ticket to any 7pm screening (regular admission is NT$50). While the festival’s short film segment provides up-and-coming filmmakers with an invaluable platform, it also allows established directors and producers to showcase independent projects.
Chuang Ching-shen (莊景燊), the director of popular Taiwanese documentary Jump! Boys (翻滾吧!男孩), teamed up with legendary producer Wang Tung (王童) to create Reflection (美麗鏡界). In the movie, actress Chamder Tsai (蔡燦得) portrays a woman divided between her job as a caretaker for three boys with learning difficulties and a life of comfort with her husband. Another notable entry is Time of Cherry Blossoms (櫻時), a gorgeous anime film that Frazier compares to Spirited Away. In the animation, a young boy has a phantasmagorical encounter with an array of deities after wondering into a dilapidated temple in the Taiwanese countryside.
Short films screen on April 13 and from April 16 to April 20 starting at 6pm every night, before the feature-length films. For a complete short film schedule and descriptions, visit urbannomaden.blogspot.com/p/short-film-info.html
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
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
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located