After its successful reinvention in 2014, the Taiwan International Documentary Festival (台灣國際紀錄片影展, TIDF) has quickly become one of the most intellectually ambitious film festivals in the country, with the aim to highlight works that challenge the existing ideas about documentary cinema.
Kidlat Tahimik’s Balikbayan #1 Memories of Overdevelopment Redux III is a 35-year work in the making that follows the life of Enrique of Malacca, a Filipino slave and interpreter to Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan.
Tahimik, considered by many to be the godfather of the Filipino avant-garde in cinema, plays the lead in this historical epic that has been called a study on colonialism and memory — both personal and cultural.
Photo courtesy of Taiwan International Documentary Festival
The section Documemory: Re-enactment explores how re-enactments can blur the line between documentary and fiction.
For example, Errol Morris’ 1988 masterpiece The Thin Blue Line uses actors to probes the wrongful imprisonment of a man in Texas, thus creating a full picture of the case. It is both an investigation of the murder and mediation on truth, fiction and the unreliability of human memory.
CURRENT AFFAIRS
Photo courtesy of Taiwan International Documentary Festival
Morgan Knibbe’s debut, Those Who Feel the Fire Burning, obliterates the boundary between fiction and non-fiction in its exploration of the European refugee crisis. The story is narrated by a ghost, the victim of the 2013 tragedy in which a boat carrying migrants from Libya sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa, resulting in the loss of more than 360 lives.
The faceless “enemy” in the Iraq War turns flesh and blood in Homeland (Iraq Year Zero). Abbas Fahdel spent 12 years making the two-part documentary, which offers an intimate glimpse into the everyday lives of Iraqis — including his family — before and after the US invasion.
Fahdel will attend the festival and hold question-and-answer sessions after the screenings.
Photo courtesy of Taiwan International Documentary Festival
TO THE HEART OF DARKNESS
This year’s Director in Focus section introduces the works of Austria-born, France-based Hubert Sauper, and will include his internationally-acclaimed African trilogy. The movies, which took him more than 20 years to complete, covers the 1994 massacre in Rwanda and neo-colonial mineral exploitation in South Sudan.
Sauper will hold lectures during the festival period.
INDEPENDENT FILM FROM CHINA
In light of Beijing’s crackdown on independent filmmaking, TIDF continues to put forth a program of Chinese independent documentaries denied public viewing in China.
In addition to the screenings, a forum on independent documentary cinema will be held by several important filmmakers, including China’s Zhao Liang (趙亮), Gu Tao (顧桃), Wu Wenguang (吳文光) and Zhang Zanbo (張贊波).
Along with seven participating filmmakers and performers, Wu will present one of his theatrical works and host a series of forums and discussions. For more information, go to the event’s bilingual Web site at www.tidf.org.tw.
The Lee (李) family migrated to Taiwan in trickles many decades ago. Born in Myanmar, they are ethnically Chinese and their first language is Yunnanese, from China’s Yunnan Province. Today, they run a cozy little restaurant in Taipei’s student stomping ground, near National Taiwan University (NTU), serving up a daily pre-selected menu that pays homage to their blended Yunnan-Burmese heritage, where lemongrass and curry leaves sit beside century egg and pickled woodear mushrooms. Wu Yun (巫雲) is more akin to a family home that has set up tables and chairs and welcomed strangers to cozy up and share a meal
The second floor of an unassuming office building in central Bangkok is a strange place to encounter the world’s largest rodent. Yet here, inside a small enclosure with a shallow pool, three capybaras are at the disposal of dozens of paying customers, all clamoring for a selfie. As people eagerly thrust leafy snacks toward the nonchalant-looking animals, few seem to consider the underlying peculiarity: how did this South American rodent end up over 10,000 miles from home, in a bustling Asian metropolis? Capybara cafes have been cropping up across the continent in recent years, driven by the animal’s growing internet fame.
President William Lai (賴清德) has proposed a NT$1.25 trillion (US$40 billion) special eight-year budget that intends to bolster Taiwan’s national defense, with a “T-Dome” plan to create “an unassailable Taiwan, safeguarded by innovation and technology” as its centerpiece. This is an interesting test for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), and how they handle it will likely provide some answers as to where the party currently stands. Naturally, the Lai administration and his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) are for it, as are the Americans. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not. The interests and agendas of those three are clear, but
Dec. 8 to Dec. 14 Chang-Lee Te-ho (張李德和) had her father’s words etched into stone as her personal motto: “Even as a woman, you should master at least one art.” She went on to excel in seven — classical poetry, lyrical poetry, calligraphy, painting, music, chess and embroidery — and was also a respected educator, charity organizer and provincial assemblywoman. Among her many monikers was “Poetry Mother” (詩媽). While her father Lee Chao-yuan’s (李昭元) phrasing reflected the social norms of the 1890s, it was relatively progressive for the time. He personally taught Chang-Lee the Chinese classics until she entered public
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