Rather than one curator’s brainchild, this year’s Taiwan International Documentary Festival (台灣國際紀錄片雙年展) is the fruit of international collaboration coordinated by Taiwanese festival director Jane Yu (游惠貞). The biennial showcase was mostly put together by the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in Japan, the Asian Network of Documentary initiated by Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea, Doc Alliance in Europe and the Beijing Film Academy (北京電影學院).
In memory of Japan’s documentary heavyweight Noriake Tsuchimoto, who passed away in June this year, Yamagata Festival organized a retrospective program of the filmmaker’s 40-year artistic career. Tsuchimoto is best known for his series that records the lives of minamata disease sufferers, an illness caused by exposure to mercury. Not confined to his role as observer, the director and his camera come off as active participants in the victims’ and their families’ life-long struggle for justice.
A fine example of Tsuchimoto’s early works that vividly portray ordinary people, On the Road follows a cab driver who toils almost 24 hours a day and seven days a week during the 1960s. The film reveals a rarely seen Japan, one that was then on the road to developed nation status.
Films grouped in the Doc Alliance section focus on European societies, while Asian viewpoints can be found in the festival’s And program, which was launched in 2005 through collaboration between curators in Japan, Thailand, Taiwan and China.
Past winners at the festival’s international competitions return with new works this year. Letter to Anna by Eric Bergktraut examines the life and death of the controversial Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in 2006.
On a lighter tone, the festival will screen Maverick Mother, 39-year-old director Janet Merewether’s whimsical journey into single motherhood.
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
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