Two young Indian women, one a contestant for Miss India, the other a militant Hindu fundamentalist, are struggling to become the masters of their lives in a patriarchal society. In a poverty-stricken rural community in North Carolina, a pair of designer/activists motivate a group of high school students to build a new farmers’ market that will provide much needed jobs.
These are two of the stories being told through the films brought to Taiwan as part of the Film Forward program, an initiative of the Sundance Institute that started in 2011 with an aim to enhance cross-cultural dialogue and collaboration around the globe.
Meredith Lavitt, director of Film Forward, says the main goal is to lessen “otherness.”
Photo courtesy of Film Forward
“It is such a rewarding experience … You are not just going to a country and meeting someone. You are meeting them through cultural discussions … You hear stories and learn about new perspectives that you wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise,” Lavitt told the Taipei Times.
Each year, members of US-based Film Forward meet with its cultural partners, including the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, to select eight documentary and narrative films from home and abroad, each with a universal theme and story that can connect and resonate with cultures and people from all over the world. The international touring program then brings the films to places across the globe. For each venue, two filmmakers come along to hold question-and-answer sessions, workshops, roundtables and discussions, sometimes in communities that may not otherwise have access to independent cinema.
The Taiwan stop is hosted in collaboration with the American Institute in Taiwan and Chinese Next (CNEX) Foundation. American documentary filmmaker Patrick Creadon will travel with his If You Build It, which follows designer/activist duo, Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller as they try out their experimental education project in rural North Carolina, and Kung Tung Technical Senior High School (公東高級工業職業學校), National Cheng Kung Commercial and Aquaculture Senior Vocational High School (成功商業水產職業學校) and Yu Ren Senior High School (育仁中學) in Taitung.
Photo courtesy of Film Forward
Ruby Chen (陳玲珍), the chief operating officer of non-profit CNEX, which promotes the development of independent documentaries in Chinese-speaking cultures, says it is the shared belief in the importance of documentary filmmaking that has brought CNEX and Sundance together.
“Independent documentary filmmaking has the responsibility to create social dialogue and an exchange of perspectives,” Chen says.
Dancing in Jaffa, for example, tells the story of Pierre Dulaine, a renowned ballroom dancer who believes the art of dancing bridges the political and cultural differences between Jewish and Palestinian Israeli children in his birthplace, Jaffa. When screened in San Diego, which is located close to the border with Mexico, the documentary generated plenty of discussion about how to “bring the two communities together,” Lavitt says.
Photo courtesy of Film Forward
“As Mexico and the US struggle with immigration issues, there are lots of parallels with the border of Mexico and the US and the border between Israel and Palestine.”
Mississippi, The World before Her by Nisha Pahuja examines two extreme ways of life in India through the lives of two young women, and how they attempt to break away from traditional stereotypes. It is a film that resonates wherever it goes, Pahuja adds.
“There are lots of communities and cultures struggling with modern culture influencing traditional ways, taking young people away from the countryside and into big cities. When we look at the two girls, we really see modern, westernized culture meets traditional ways of life.”
Photo courtesy of Film Forward
Pahuja will attend three after-screening discussions and a roundtable with local documentary filmmakers in Taiwan during the six-day event.
The touring Film Forward program started yesterday and runs through May 6 at several venues in Taipei, Greater Taichung, Taitung and Hualien. For more information, go to CNEX’s Web site at www.cnex.org.tw and click on Film Forward.
Photo courtesy of Film Forward
Photo courtesy of Film Forward
Last week, Viola Zhou published a marvelous deep dive into the culture clash between Taiwanese boss mentality and American labor practices at the Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) plant in Arizona in Rest of World. “The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company,” while the Taiwanese said American workers aren’t dedicated. The article is a delight, but what it is depicting is the clash between a work culture that offers employee autonomy and at least nods at work-life balance, and one that runs on hierarchical discipline enforced by chickenshit. And it runs on chickenshit because chickenshit is a cultural
My previous column Donovan’s Deep Dives: The powerful political force that vanished from the English press on April 23 began with three paragraphs of what would be to most English-language readers today incomprehensible gibberish, but are very typical descriptions of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) internal politics in the local Chinese-language press. After a quiet period in the early 2010s, the English press stopped writing about the DPP factions, the factions changed and eventually local English-language journalists could not reintroduce the subject without a long explanation on the context that would not fit easily in a typical news article. That previous
April 29 to May 5 One month before the Taipei-Keelung New Road (北基新路) was set to open, the news that US general Douglas MacArthur had died, reached Taiwan. The military leader saw Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that was of huge strategic value to the US. He’d been a proponent of keeping it out of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hands. Coupled with the fact that the US had funded more than 50 percent of the road’s construction costs, the authorities at the last minute renamed it the MacArthur Thruway (麥帥公路) for his “great contributions to the free world and deep
Years ago, I was thrilled when I came across a map online showing a fun weekend excursion: a long motorcycle ride into the mountains of Pingtung County (屏東) going almost up to the border with Taitung County (台東), followed by a short hike up to a mountain lake with the mysterious name of “Small Ghost Lake” (小鬼湖). I shared it with a more experienced hiking friend who then proceeded to laugh. Apparently, this road had been taken out by landslides long before and was never going to be fixed. Reaching the lake this way — or any way that would