The Urban Nomad Film Fest kicked off yesterday and will present movies, documentaries and forums over the next 10 days at theaters in Taipei.
The annual festival has a new program this year called The Culture of Tech, which is meant to broaden our understanding of technology by seeing it as more than just science and business. The groundwork for this thesis is laid out by 8-Bit Generation, a film the follows the birth of the personal computer and home video games.
The culture of Silicon Valley is explored in The Singularity, a film that examines the futurists and techno-optimists who believe that tech can solve the world’s problems, a way of thinking that Werner Herzog criticizes in Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World. The Singularity director Doug Wolens will be on hand for a panel discussion about the movie on May 20.
Photo courtesy of Barney Clay and Urban Nomad
Game Fever broadens the perspective to mass culture by looking at gamer culture and how eSports tournaments are taking over sports stadiums.
The festival will also show the first feature film shot and distributed in real time on social media, Sickhouse, a 65-minute horror film made on iPhones and distributed to 100 million viewers on SnapChat.
■ Urban Nomad runs until May 21.
■ For more information about movies, times, ticket prices and venues, visit the festival’s Chinese and English-language Web site: urbannomad.tw
Growing up in a rural, religious community in western Canada, Kyle McCarthy loved hockey, but once he came out at 19, he quit, convinced being openly gay and an active player was untenable. So the 32-year-old says he is “very surprised” by the runaway success of Heated Rivalry, a Canadian-made series about the romance between two closeted gay players in a sport that has historically made gay men feel unwelcome. Ben Baby, the 43-year-old commissioner of the Toronto Gay Hockey Association (TGHA), calls the success of the show — which has catapulted its young lead actors to stardom -- “shocking,” and says
Inside an ordinary-looking townhouse on a narrow road in central Kaohsiung, Tsai A-li (蔡阿李) raised her three children alone for 15 years. As far as the children knew, their father was away working in the US. They were kept in the dark for as long as possible by their mother, for the truth was perhaps too sad and unjust for their young minds to bear. The family home of White Terror victim Ko Chi-hua (柯旗化) is now open to the public. Admission is free and it is just a short walk from the Kaohsiung train station. Walk two blocks south along Jhongshan
The 2018 nine-in-one local elections were a wild ride that no one saw coming. Entering that year, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized and in disarray — and fearing an existential crisis. By the end of the year, the party was riding high and swept most of the country in a landslide, including toppling the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in their Kaohsiung stronghold. Could something like that happen again on the DPP side in this year’s nine-in-one elections? The short answer is not exactly; the conditions were very specific. However, it does illustrate how swiftly every assumption early in an
Jan. 19 to Jan. 25 In 1933, an all-star team of musicians and lyricists began shaping a new sound. The person who brought them together was Chen Chun-yu (陳君玉), head of Columbia Records’ arts department. Tasked with creating Taiwanese “pop music,” they released hit after hit that year, with Chen contributing lyrics to several of the songs himself. Many figures from that group, including composer Teng Yu-hsien (鄧雨賢), vocalist Chun-chun (純純, Sun-sun in Taiwanese) and lyricist Lee Lin-chiu (李臨秋) remain well-known today, particularly for the famous classic Longing for the Spring Breeze (望春風). Chen, however, is not a name
RSS