When Till DiLumiere graduated from film school at Kunshan University (崑山科技大學), he was faced with two options: move to Taipei (Tainan wasn’t exactly a hotspot for emerging filmmakers) or give up on filmmaking altogether. Now an assistant professor at Dayeh University’s (大葉大學) European Languages and Visual Communication Design departments, DiLumiere decided back then to find a way to put the southern city on Taiwan’s filmmaking map.
In 2011, DiLumiere visited the Rende Erkong New Village (仁德二空新村) in Tainan where its residents, including some of his friends, were told to vacate their dwellings because they were about to be demolished.
“Faced with imminent demolition, the community at Erkong had decided to take fate into their own hands and attempt to save their homes by turning them into public art,” DiLumiere tells the Taipei Times.
Photo courtesy of Till DiLumiere
At that time, DiLumiere and another German, Heinz Hermanns, were looking for a venue to screen selections from the International Short Film Festival in Berlin (Interfilm Berlin). Erkong, with its unintentional dilapidated-chic vibe, seemed liked an ideal place to host a chill, open-air screening while raising awareness of the plight of the inhabitants.
The idea, DiLumiere says, killed two birds with one stone, bringing films “to people who normally wouldn’t go to see short films.”
SCREENING AT THE HILL
Photo courtesy of Till DiLumiere
Since then, DiLumiere has been organizing German short film festivals in Tainan, alongside the Tainan 39 Hour Short Film Contestival (Tainan 39HR, 臺南三 十 九小時拍片競賽) which he cofounded in 2012, where teams create a short film in 39 hours based on pre-selected genres.
This year is the first time that DiLumiere’s selection of German short films will be screened in Taipei. Tomorrow night, a selection of 10 shorts from Interfilm Berlin and three from Tainan 39HR will be screened at Treasure Hill Artist Village, a squatter community-turned-art venue with a similar vibe as Erkong. There will be English and Chinese subtitles, translated by DiLumiere’s students.
“To ensure the best viewing experience, we have cold beer and mosquito repellent on site,” DiLumiere says.
Photo courtesy of Till DiLumiere
Tomorrow’s screening, co-organized by the Goethe Institute in Taipei (台北歌德學院), is meant to promote cross-cultural dialogue between Taiwan and Germany. DiLumiere says films in general provide a great way to glimpse into a foreign culture, including its people, customs and language.
DiLumiere says viewers will learn about “a German outlook on society, gender roles and sense of humor — which, contrary to common belief, actually exists.”
The hope is for such events like this to provide a platform for creative types to, as DiLumiere says, “meet and network, to watch each other’s films, get inspired and find like-minded filmmakers for future collaboration.”
Photo courtesy of Till DiLumiere
JUST LIKE PUNK
Most of the audience will likely be film buffs, and as to why cinema virgins would be interested in foreign short films, DiLumiere says half-jokingly, “I’m a kid of the ’80s and to me, short films are punk.”
“They allow you to make your own rules, free yourself of worries about box office success and other Hollywood conventions,” he adds.
Photo courtesy of Till DiLumiere
Raw and innovative is the order of the night. The beauty of short films is that the audience will most likely be able to stay with the story for a few minutes no matter how crazy it is.
“If it’s outright terrible, well, then at least it’s over soon,” DiLumiere says.
However, viewers can rest assured that tomorrow’s films are top-notch. Every year, Interfilm Berlin receives over 7,000 entries from around the world, of which 500 make it to the final program. Ten of those will be shown at Treasure Hill, with genres ranging from fiction to animation to experimental.
Photo courtesy of Till DiLumiere
Taiwan’s English education system is being pulled apart by three opposing forces. Bilingual Nation 2030 pulls students toward English and global communication. Artificial Intelligence (AI) readiness pulls them toward digital judgment, verification and AI-mediated work. But Taiwan’s old exam culture pulls them back toward memorization, grammar drills, timed reading and correct answers. If the education system keeps using old exams to define success, it risks producing graduates who are neither genuinely bilingual nor genuinely AI-ready, but trained for tasks machines can already perform. The first force is Bilingual Nation 2030. Launched in 2018, the policy aimed to “help Taiwan’s workforce connect
“Taiwan’s Opposition Leader Comes to US With a Message Straight Out of Beijing” read a May 31 headline in the Wall Street Journal. Top US administration officials and members of Congress almost certainly read the WSJ, and if there was a bullet point takeaway that people in Washington should absorb ahead of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun’s (鄭麗文) arrival in DC on June 9, that headline is it. The last few columns have discussed this very topic, and the timing is not coincidental. While those top officials likely do not read the Taipei Times, judging by the number
With weighty, anxiety-inducing geopolitical topics dominating the headlines, checking in on the wild and weird state of local politics can take some of the edge off. This November’s elections will determine who will be in charge of fixing potholes in your neighborhood, not the potholes in Taiwan’s complicated geopolitical space. Recently, after an online interview with a Taipei-based journalist, I commented that Taipei journalists never go further than the MRT can take them. He laughed and agreed. Naturally, the Taipei mayoral race is eating up much of the press attention. TAIPEI CITY Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Puma Shen (沈伯洋) has
As someone who normally steers clear of books with “transcendence” or “metaphysics” in their subtitles, this reviewer — a casual observer of local belief systems since the 1990s — found Fabian Graham’s Money God Temples in Taiwan a challenging read. Those who’ve only dipped their toes into temple culture will likely need to parse several sections with special care if they’re to keep up with the author, a British ethnographic researcher whose previous books have investigated religious practices among ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia. This scholarly volume examines a facet of Taiwan’s religious landscape that didn’t exist a century ago, and
RSS