Competition in the Digital Shorts category of the Golden Horse Film Festival began last night with screenings of Taiwanese and -- this year for the first time -- international entrants.
Competition films are shown in four groups and will be screened until Tuesday, when the winners will be announced at Warner Village.
The Digital Shorts section is one of the festival's newest projects, having started three years ago with competition limited to Taiwanese short films. This year, the competition was opened to foreign filmmakers and saw over 300 entries. After the initial selection, locally made short films accounted for eight of the 34 competing films.
The use of digital technology in the production of the films and their short length -- most clock in at less than 10 minutes -- make the category one of the more interesting features of the festival, showcasing a range of styles that would become unwieldy or simply unwatchable in a feature-length film. Some of the films stylistically resemble music videos, while others give the impression of being video art projects.
With low-cost digital editing and film technology widely available, the category also opens itself to students and semi-professional filmmakers, which is apparent in the selections for this year's competition.
Digital Shorts highlights
Carnt Sleep
by Owen Oppenheimer
A young man and woman spend a sleepless night alone in adjacent rooms, tossing and turning from their mutual desire for each other that they for some reason haven't expressed. With a split screen, we can see the action in both rooms as the two squirm in discomfort over their repressed emotions and eventually lash out.
Showa Shinzan
by Reiko Loader
Shot with a mixture of archive World War II footage and animation, this film tells the story of a mysterious old man from the perspective of his granddaughter. The man is surveying a volcano in Hokkaido that threatens his town and his warnings to authorities go unheeded, which sets the stage for a natural calamity to compound the hardships already brought on by the war.
Down
by Frank Brandstetter
This is a haunting, silent, slow-motion video of a girl standing in an idyllic meadow, where, as the camera pans out, toys and other objects on the ground around her shoot into the sky. The footage is shown in reverse, until the end, when a camera trick turns notions of time and space on their heads.
His-men Street
by Lin Yu-hsien
A DJ, a skateboarder, a dancer and a graffiti artist are portrayed in this documentary-style look at underground youth culture in Taipei. They have their own stories of alienation and confusion but a common link to the city's growing urban counter culture. This film finally unmasks the artist behind the cartoon faces stenciled on so many of Taipei's electric switch boxes.
Otsu
by Lucas Valerie
A fun animation featuring a mad scientist bearing an uncanny resemblance to Einstein living amid dreary heaps of machinery, who is awakened, so to speak, to the outside world by an apple falling on his head, in a reference to Isaac Newton. Wishing to discover where the apple came from, the scientist constructs a helicopter-like pod and flies upward, where, a colorful, dazzling surprise awaits him.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
In the aftermath of the 2020 general elections the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) had crushed them in a second landslide in a row, with their presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) winning more votes than any in Taiwan’s history. The KMT did pick up three legislative seats, but the DPP retained an outright majority. To take responsibility for that catastrophic loss, as is customary, party chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) resigned. This would mark the end of an era of how the party operated and the beginning of a new effort at reform, first under
RSS