The Taiwan International Human Rights Film Festival opened in Taipei last week to mark the 30th anniversary of the lifting of Martial Law and encourage reflection on human rights issues.
Two Taiwanese and nine foreign films are to be screened at 18 locations nationwide during the seven-week festival organized by the Preparatory Office of the National Human Rights Museum.
“There was a time when Taiwan believed in collectivism and believed that economic prosperity would bring happiness,” Deputy Minister of Culture Ting Hsiao-ching (丁曉菁) said at the opening of the festival on Saturday last week.
Photo: CNA
“The fact is, authoritarian rule allowed the state machinery to cause a lot of collective harm in certain periods,” Ting said.
She said some people are still unwilling to face the past and might think that it had nothing to do with them.
“But if we cannot bravely face the real reasons that caused these tragedies, it will be hard for us to begin our transitional justice process,” Ting said.
She said her ministry worked with the festival’s organizers to select the films in the hope that audiences would be inspired to think about how to prevent such tragedies in the future.
The festival started at the in89 Cinemax movie theater in Taipei’s Wanhua District (萬華) with the documentary The Gatekeepers, by Israeli director Dror Moreh, which tells the story of Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, from the perspective of six of its former leaders.
In the film, the former Shin Bet leaders reflect on their decisions and take a new look at their enemies at the time, said Angelika Wang (王耿瑜), director of the Taiwan Original Filmmakers Union and curator of the film festival.
“The film is about how people should open their hearts and talk to each other, so that there can be peace and prosperity, because hate only invites more hate, Wang said.
Two of other films to be screened, Art War and Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock & Roll, both tell the story of artists in a troubled nation, Wang said.
Art War by German documentary maker Marco Wilms is about young Egyptian artists using graffiti, music and art to keep the revolution that started during the Arab Spring alive.
John Pirozzi’s Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten explores the vibrant Cambodian rock music scene of the 1960s and 1970s, before the rise of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime and the Cambodian genocide.
The two Taiwanese films to be screened are The Last Insurrection (末代叛亂犯) and The White Prince (白色王子).
The first is about the 1991 Taiwan Independence Association incident, when four people, including a student, were arrested and accused of organizing pro-independence activities.
The White Prince portrays the life of former political prisoner Tsai Kun-lin (蔡焜霖), who was imprisoned in the 1950s during the White Terror period for joining a book club.
Tsai, who attended the festival on Saturday last week, said Taiwan has made huge progress since the 1950s, when doctors, professors and even innocent children were brutally suppressed, imprisoned or killed.
Now, former political prisoners, government officials and academics can sit down together to watch a human rights film and think about transitional justice, Tsai said.
“I cherish this moment very much,” he said.
Martial law was imposed in Taiwan on May 19, 1949, and lifted by then-president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) on July 15, 1987.
During the martial law era, people were not allowed to form political parties and there was no right of assembly, free speech or publication.
The White Terror era describes the period from the 228 Incident in 1947 until martial law was lifted in 1987. During that period, many people were killed and an estimated 140,000 to 200,000 — many of which were intellectuals and members of the social elite — were imprisoned.
The touring film festival runs until Nov. 29.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching