The global undercurrents of angst and collective fear are the motifs of two film events set to open tomorrow. The 2015 Taipei Documentary Film Festival (2015國際華人紀錄片影展) responds to challenges and problems relevant to our daily lives with 38 works addressing a broad range of environmental and social issues. On the Road Film Festival (在路上影展) takes its cue from Jack Kerouac’s defining novel of the Beat Generation, On the Road, to look at the human condition with a more existential and literary approach through a daring, compact lineup of 21 feature, documentary, experimental and short films.
TAIPEI DOCUMENTARY FILM FEST
Restless Mind of Turbulent Years (忐忑流年) is the theme for the documentary film fest and emphasizes marginalized people in cities. The festival is organized by Chinese Next, or CNEXT, a nonprofit that disperses money to aspiring documentary filmmakers in Chinese-speaking regions.
Photo courtesy of Spot — Taipei Film House and CNEX Foundation
A Tale of Waste City (廢城記) transports audiences to a makeshift community built from waste by urban scavengers in Beijing. The city is located three kilometers from the National Stadium and is home to over 30,000 workers and their families who hail from China’s Henan Province. Life is tough but carries on — until, that is, the residents are told that the community is soon to be demolished.
Polish director Hanna Polak’s Something Better to Come follows a Russian girl named Yula for 14 years as she grows up on a gigantic landfill with her mother, friends and many others living off people’s waste outside Moscow. The documentary discovers humanity in the most dehumanizing situation, and sees Yula, now a young adult, holding her head up high and daring to dream.
Other highlights include up-and-coming Chinese documentary director Du Haibin’s (杜海濱) A Young Patriot (少年小趙), an intimate documentary that chronicles five years in the life of Zhao, a Chinese millennial who is brought up to believe in Maoism, but, as he stumbles into adulthood and goes to college, starts to question his country’s turn toward rampant state capitalism.
Photo courtesy of Spot — Taipei Film House and CNEX Foundation
Another portrait of the millennials from the US, The Internet’s Own Boy: the Story of Aaron Swartz celebrates the life of Aaron Swartz, a hacktivist devoted to advocating freedom of information in the digital age. The 26-year-old Swartz committed suicide in his Brooklyn apartment in 2013 after being threatened with a 35-year jail term.
ON THE ROAD FILM FEST
Across town, film enthusiasts are given a change to revisit familiar masterpieces and explore experimental works at the On the Road Film Festival, which, according to curator Yang Yuan-ling (楊元鈴), treats film as a voyage through time and space, across cultural borders and into the psyche.
Serbian director Emir Kusturica’s Time of the Gypsies (1988), for example, tells the surreal and absorbing tale about the life of a family of gypsies in former Yugoslavia. Die-hard cinephiles will be delighted to know that this Cannes-winning masterpiece was shot in 35mm film. Another classic shown in 35mm is Leningrad Cowboys Go America, Aki Kaurismaki’s 1989 road movie which attracted worldwide attention to the Finnish auteur known for his singular blend of bleak comedy with warm humanism.
On the avant-garde end, American experimental filmmaker, artist and scholar James Benning’s Easy Rider (2012) is a feature-length remake of Dennis Hopper’s 1969 classic of the same title. As the original work is thought to be a landmark film that captures the US counterculture of the 1960s, Benning’s version searches for the counter-culture in today’ America.
Female artists are also featured predominantly on the lineup. German new media artist Verena Kyselka creates an imaginative muse of Taiwan’s history with The Formosa Experiment (2014), while her Territory of Beauties (2012) was inspired by the Taiwanese female artists she interviewed.
American experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs is known for her formally diverse oeuvre that explores the relationship between personal and collective experiences. Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (1994) is the director’s travelogue in Vietnam that mixes personal memories, history and parables.
Apart from screenings, several filmmakers will discuss their works during the festival period. Participating directors include Kyselka and Taiwanese experimental filmmaker Cheng Li-ming (鄭立明). More information can be found at www.spot.org.tw.
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