Urban Nomad Film Fest (城市游牧影展) continues its partnership with Spring Scream (春吶音樂祭) with the underground film festival screening movies at a side stage for the third year.
In a prelude to the 10th edition of the main Urban Nomad at the end of this month, Urban Nomad at Spring Scream will serve as a laid-back video party at the campground in Oluanpi Lighthouse National Park.
According to its cofounder David Frazier (formerly a reporter at the Taipei Times), the festival will focus on animation and music videos.
Photo Courtesy of Urban Nomad
“The audiences will be overloaded with too much music,” Frazier said. “We want to provide something simple they can watch.”
Frazier intends to mix the short films from the Urban Nomad repertoire with music videos by bands playing at Spring Scream. He has 700 gigabytes of short films to choose from and intends to improvise partially. Three titles have already been short listed.
Abaddon is a 52-minute visual album produced by The Corrupted (Paul Kemp and Gareth Murfin). The film, which features non-stop mind-blowing animated images, was screened last year at Urban Nomad and caught the attention of Taiwan indie band Loh Tsui Kweh Commune (LTK, 濁水溪公社). The band’s lead singer Hsiao-ko (小柯) later commissioned The Corrupted to direct the music video for LTK’s 2010 single Take That, My Love (情人看刀).
Deathbowl to Downtown, directed by American documentary makers Coan Nichols and Rick Charnoski, chronicles the development of skateboarding through “street skating” in the 1990s.
Blood Shed is a horror short based on an article from the skateboard magazine Thrasher. The story follows a group of kids who skate at a house inhabited by a satanic cult, and then gleefully crashes into B movie delirium.
“There will be no plot and no emotional involvement,” Frazier promised. “It’s just a place for people to relax.”
At the Brics summit in South Africa in August, Xi Jinping (習近平) made headlines when he failed to appear at a leaders’ meeting to deliver a scheduled speech. Another scene also did the rounds: a Chinese aide hurrying to catch up with Xi, only to be body slammed by security guards and held back, flailing, as the president cruised on through the closing doors, not bothered by the chaos behind him. The first incident prompted rampant speculation about Xi’s health, a political crisis or conspiracy. The second, mostly memes. But it perhaps served as a metaphor. Xi has had a rough few
A recent report by TaiwanPlus presented a widely believed factoid about solar photovoltaic (PV) power farms: “they take precious land away from agriculture.” Similarly, a Reuters piece from August last year contends that agricultural land in Taiwan is precious and that “there is little room for sprawling wind and solar farms, which take up significantly more space than conventional energy sources.” Both of Reuters’ claims are false. There is plenty of room in Taiwan for all the renewable energy systems we need. Our problem is not a lack of land, but Taiwan’s crazed land management policies and programs. An excellent
While participating in outrigger canoe activities in Hawaii, Yvonne Jiann (江伊茉) often heard indigenous locals say that their ancestors came from Taiwan. “I didn’t really understand why,” the long-time US resident tells the Taipei Times. Growing up in Taipei, she knew little about indigenous culture. “Only when I returned to Taiwan did I learn about our shared Austronesian cultural background and saw the similarities.” Jiann visited Taiwan just before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down international travel. Unable to leave and missing her canoe family across the Pacific Ocean, she started the Taiwan Outrigger Canoe Club (TOCC) and began researching how
As Vladimir Nabokov revised his autobiography, Speak, Memory, he found himself in a strange psychological state. He had first written the book in English, published in 1951. A few years later, a New York publisher asked him to translate it back into Russian for the emigre community. The use of his mother tongue brought back a flood of new details from his childhood, which he converted into his adopted language for a final edition, published in 1966. “This re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place, proved to be a