An image museum long planned by the Government Information Office (GIO) to collect documentary films and other images was inaugurated yesterday in Taichung, central Taiwan.
GIO Minister Pasuya Yao (
Yao noted that it was Lin who made the decision to establish the museum in Taichung and that the name has its inspiration from web-logs (usually shortened to blogs), a form of online personal journals.
The museum collects the most comprehensive contemporary documentary films in Taiwan, Yao said, adding that he hopes it will also become an interchange and discussion center for central Taiwan.
Yao noted that the GIO has had a series of pieces of good news recently. The GIO-assisted documentary film Jump! Boys, depicting gymnasts undergoing gruelling training made more than NT$2.5 million (US$79,365) at the box office because of good reviews. Another documentary film Let it Be, depicting the lives of rice farmers, also made more than NT$2 million.
The Wayward Cloud, an award-winning film at the Berlin Festival this year, also set a box office record of more than NT$20 million, Yao added.
He praised Lin for his measures and policy of assisting domestic film workers when he was GIO head.
Lin, for his part, said there is a national movie center in northern Taiwan, but it mainly collects feature films, while the central museum will focus on collecting documentary films.
Kenting National Park service technician Yang Jien-fon (楊政峰) won a silver award in World Grand Prix Photography Awards Spring Season for his photograph of two male rat snakes intertwined in combat. Yang’s colleagues at Kenting National Park said he is a master of nature photography who has been held back by his job in civil service. The awards accept entries in all four seasons across six categories: architectural and urban photography, black-and-white and fine art photography, commercial and fashion photography, documentary and people photography, nature and experimental photography, and mobile photography. Awards are ranked according to scores and divided into platinum, gold and
More than half of the bamboo vipers captured in Tainan in the past few years were found in the city’s Sinhua District (新化), while other districts had smaller catches or none at all. Every year, Tainan captures about 6,000 snakes which have made their way into people’s homes. Of the six major venomous snakes in Taiwan, the cobra, the many-banded krait, the brown-spotted pit viper and the bamboo viper are the most frequently captured. The high concentration of bamboo vipers captured in Sinhua District is puzzling. Tainan Agriculture Bureau Forestry and Nature Conservation Division head Chu Chien-ming (朱健明) earlier this week said that the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus yesterday said it opposes the introduction of migrant workers from India until a mechanism is in place to prevent workers from absconding. Minister of Labor Hung Sun-han (洪申翰) on Thursday told the Legislative Yuan that the first group of migrant workers from India could be introduced as early as this year, as part of a government program. The caucus’ opposition to the policy is based on the assessment that “the risk is too high,” KMT caucus secretary-general Lin Pei-hsiang (林沛祥) said. Taiwan has a serious and long-standing problem of migrant workers absconding from their contracts, indicating that
SPACE VETERAN: Kjell N. Lindgren, who helps lead NASA’s human spaceflight missions, has been on two expeditions on the ISS and has spent 311 days in space Taiwan-born US astronaut Kjell N. Lindgren is to visit Taiwan to promote technological partnerships through one of the programs organized by the US for its 250th national anniversary. Lindgren would be in Taiwan from Tuesday to Saturday next week as part of the US Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs’ US Speaker Program, organized to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) said in a statement yesterday. Lindgren plans to engage with key leaders across the nation “to advance cutting-edge technological partnerships and inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers,”