The Taiwan Ecology Film Festival began in Taipei yesterday with teasers for three new documentaries on the nation’s ecology. Starting today, it is to hold more than 5,200 screenings of documentaries nationwide to promote the importance of ecological conservation.
The festival, which ends on Oct. 19, will feature 40 documentaries on the nation’s flora and fauna to be screened in 54 venues spanning 20 cities and counties.
Among the three documentaries highlighted at a press conference in Taipei was Satoyama Taiwan (里山台灣: 滄海桑田桃花源), a documentary about the decline and rise of Bayan Village (八煙) in Jinshan District (金山), New Taipei City.
It documented the predicament the locals encountered when young people left home and moved to the city, and how the village discovered a new livelihood by promoting recreational agriculture, which helped bolster its frail economy and see the return of the young people.
The film’s director, Chiu Ming-yuan (邱銘源), said he hoped to raise awareness about the difficult situations the people encountered in Bayan, whose terraced rice paddies can produce no more than half the harvest yielded by flat-surfaced farmland.
He said that the film promotes Bayan’s beauty to help the tribe develop its tourism and recreational agriculture.
Another documentary whose teaser was shown yesterday was The Slug Snake and the Snail (蝸牛與鈍頭蛇) by Hsu Jian-kuo (徐建國), which examines the intriguing relationship between a predator and its prey, and how the two species are said to have evolved in relation to each other to increase their chances of survival.
The third film was Fear of the Feared: The Life of the Green Bamboo Viper (恐怖者的恐懼,赤尾青竹絲生態紀錄片), directed by Jiang Guo-bin (江國賓). It shows the challenges encountered by the green bamboo viper, a poisonous snake often feared by people, by taking audiences through the reptile’s daily life.
“By taking the snake’s perspective, the film highlights the paradoxical relationship between the widely feared viper and those who fear it, that they actually fear us more than we fear them,” Jiang said.
Four other films, Matsu’s Golden Bats (黃金蝙蝠), Muses of the Air: Endemic Birds of Taiwan (展翼的謬思), Chia Ming Lake (嘉明湖) and The Black Kite in Taiwan (守望黑鳶), are also scheduled to premiere at the festival.
The film festival is jointly held by the Forestry Bureau and the National Central Library.
Forestry Bureau Director-General Lee Tao-sheng (李桃生) said this year’s festival is the largest compared with the three previous ones in 2006, 2011 and last year.
He said he hopes that the high-quality documentaries would help promote Taiwan’s rich biodiversity on the world stage.
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