The hit Taiwanese documentary Go Grandriders (不老騎士 ) was screened on Tuesday at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), to a full house, as part of a tour of the US by the film.
The documentary portrays the story of 17 octogenarians who took a 1,178km trip around Taiwan by motorcycle. It follows the group’s 13-day journey and the hurdles they faced along the way, such as adverse weather and poor health.
The film’s 31-year-old director, Hua Tien-hao (華天灝), and producer, Ben Tsiang (蔣顯斌), were present at the UCLA screening.
Hua said he originally planned to produce a 15-minute short, but it morphed into a 90-minute film.
What surprised him most was the film, which was released in October last year in Taiwan, broke box-office records for a local documentary.
Hua and Tsiang are visiting the US because the documentary has been selected for this year’s Center for Asian American Media festival, which started on Thursday last week and ends on Sunday.
Hua and Tsiang were scheduled to travel to New York yesterday to attend a screening there.
An additional screening of the film will be held in Los Angeles late next month.
One elderly American who came to see the movie said he also likes motorcycle riding, but gave it up recently because of an injury.
However, the film has inspired him to continue riding, he said.
Also present at the UCLA film screening were Freddie Spencer, three-time world champion motorcycle racer, and Peter Starr, a Discovery Channel producer, who was inspired by the film to organize a group of “American grandriders,” who traveled to Taiwan to experience the same adventure in November last year.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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