A film made entirely with Google Maps and another composed with old footage found at flea markets aren’t the kind of things that fit the mould of documentary film. This year’s Taiwan International Documentary Festival (台灣國際紀錄片影展, TIDF), however, wants to change that.
As part of the Ministry of Culture’s effort to support documentary filmmaking, the festival now operates under the Taiwan Film Institute (國家電影中心).
With Re-counter Reality as its theme, the festival features an excitingly rich lineup of more than 130 films from 33 countries, encompassing past classics by Claude Lanzmann and Shinsuke Ogawa as well as artistically challenging, new works meant to challenge existing ideas about documentary cinema.
Photo courtesy of TIDF
“From now on, we will take a more conceptual approach,” says Wood Lin (林木材), the festival’s program director.
“There are many different, free forms of expression, which are generally lacking in Taiwan’s documentary film scene... It is part of the festival’s job to introduce the different faces of documentary cinema,” he says.
EXPLORING REALITY
Photo courtesy of TIDF
A fine example can be found in the work of Alan Berliner, one of this year’s featured directors. Having started his career making installation art and collage films in the late 1970s, the American filmmaker uses discarded film footage as the inspiration and material for his poetic, imaginative and often compelling films. While experimental in form, Berliner’s cinematic world revolves around the subject matter the director most intimately: himself. He explores topics such as memory, family and identity.
The director’s devotion to revealing humanity through the private and the personal is heralded in his first feature-length experimental documentary The Family Album (1986), edited entirely from 16mm home movies that were shot in the 1920s through the 1950s.
Berliner will hold a master class on Oct. 18 to share his filmmaking journey with local audiences.
Photo courtesy of TIDF
From the section Stranger than Documentary, This is Roberto Delgado challenges the conventional ideas about what a documentary film should look like as director Javier Loarte puts together a work of nostalgia using Google Maps of a neighborhood in Madrid, Spain, where he used to live.
The section Documemory: Inter-View explores the relationship between memories and the act of documenting and how reality is created through interviews. A mockumentary by the late Japanese filmmaker Shohei Imamura, A Man Vanishes (1967), is constructed as an investigation into a case of a missing salesman.
Selected by Sight & Sound magazine as one of the greatest documentaries of all time, French director Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) is a nine-and-a-half-hour documentary of the Holocaust that took a decade to make and was shot in 14 countries. It consists mainly of interviews with survivors, witnesses and the Germans who perpetrated the horror. The film will be shown twice.
Photo courtesy of TIDF
What’s even more exciting is that the 89-year-old Lanzmann will bring his latest work, The Last of the Unjust, to the festival and hold a one-hour long question-and-answer session after the screening tomorrow. The tickets are selling fast.
TILT TOWARD ASIA
The newly evolved TIDF also comes with a fresh ambition to establish itself as an important platform for documentary films in Asia. In addition to the annual International Competition (國際競賽), which features 15 works selected from 1,102 entries this year, Asian Vision Competition (亞洲視野競賽) was launched to encourage Asian documentaries less visible in the international film festival circle.
“Compared to big-budget documentary films in Europe, there are mostly independent productions in Asian countries. A filmmaker might spend five, 10 years working on a project with a budget of US$100. We particularly want to encourage works with distinctive Asian features. They may be rough in terms of production value but have great power,” Lin says.
Spark (星火), for example, is a cinematic exploration by Chinese director Hu Jie (胡杰) into the history of Sparks of Fire (星火), the only surviving underground periodical from the period of Great Leap Forward (大躍進), an economic and social campaign led by Mao Zedong (毛澤東) that caused the widespread famine known as The Great Famine.
CHINA’S CRACKDOWN ON INDEPENDENT FILM
In light of Chinese government’s increasing crackdown on independent filmmaking in recent years, TIDF has collaborated with four of China’s foremast platforms for independent cinema — Chongqing Independent Film and Video Festival (重慶獨立影展), China Independent Film Festival (中國獨立影像年度展) in Nanjing, the Yunnan Multi-Cultural Visual Festival (雲之南紀錄影像展) and Beijing Independent Film Festival (北京獨立影像展) — to put forth a lineup of 20 Chinese independent documentaries made in the past decade covering a broad range of issues and genres.
Over the past few years, the four independent film festivals have been shut down, scaled back or similarly frustrated. Lin was at the Beijing Independent Film Festival this year, which was dramatically shut down by the police, who confiscated the festival organizers’ computers and all their collections of films, DVDs and publications. Lin was given a USB flash drive containing all the selected films instead.
“It was difficult to put together this section. They couldn’t send out the film copies and DVDs. We had to ask people to go to China and smuggled them out,” Lin says.
On Monday, several programmers and filmmakers from the four festivals will hold a forum to discuss independent filmmaking in China.
OGAWA TRIBUTE
The festival will also host a retrospective, long overdue in this writer’s opinion, on the work of Ogawa (1936 to 1992), who is revered as a giant of documentary cinema and has influenced popular local filmmakers such as Wu Yi-feng (吳乙峰). Nine of Ogawa’s films will be screened.
“Wu was close to Ogawa. He and his Full Shot Foundation (全景傳播基金會) [a defunct documentary filmmaker workshop] followed and passed on Ogawa’s filmmaking philosophy and spirit. Many people started making documentaries after receiving training from Full Shot,” he says.
Devoted to radical politics, resistance, village life and collective production, the work of Ogawa arrives promptly at the time when Taiwan is currently experiencing a new wave of social movements. The selected films represent the director’s three major filmmaking phases. The first period focuses on the student movement between 1966 and 1968. From 1968 to 1975, Ogawa and his collaborators, who collectively formed Ogawa Productions, made seven films documenting the violent struggle of local farmers over the construction of Tokyo’s Narita airport. From 1975 onward, Ogawa and his team moved to the rural village of Magino, Yamagata Prefecture, to live and work with local farmers until the director passed away in 1992. During that time, the team created a series of unique portraits of a rural way of life that is rarely depicted in films.
Koshiro Otsu, a former cameraman from Ogawa Production, revisited the site of Narita airport after 45 years in his directorial work The Wages of Resistance. On Sunday, the 84-year-old filmmaker will jointly hold a forum with Hiroko Hatanaka, a member of Ogawa Production, and Markus Nornes, an American specialist on Ogawa’s films.
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