Mujō (The Heartless)

Released circa 1942-1943, Kokumin Dojo (Civilian Training Centre) was a Japanese state-sponsored propaganda film documenting rituals used to convert Taiwanese people into 'imperial' Japanese subjects. This work offers a contemporary critical re-enactment of selfhood and emotional erasure as colonial policy, staging four young immigrants in Japan under off-camera command, synchronised with the original film.

Asia Is One

Opening with the Japanese national anthem, the film traces Taiwanese labourers in Okinawa, mass student labour in the Sakishima Islands, and Shōwa-era (1926–1989) coal mining on Iriomote. Travelling from Yonaguni to Taiwan, it reaches a Tayal village shaped by the Musha Incident (1930), where the noontime bell was replaced by the Imperial Japanese military song, 'Umi Yukaba'.

Shonenko

Shonenko documents 8,419 Taiwanese teenagers mobilised to Japan to manufacture military aircraft during the Second World War. Drawn by promises of education, they were later caught amid post-war politics and shifting regimes in Taiwan, Japan, and China. The film brings into focus quiet endurance, fractured belonging, and personal histories long left untold.

Suspended Duty: Taiwan Military Training Regiment

Formed in 1950 under General Sun Li-jen, Taiwan's Military Training Regiment recruited over 4,000 young men to build a new army. Abruptly ordered into 'suspended duty', they waited decades without discharge. Through interviews and satirical propaganda-style narration, the film examines how politics disciplines bodies, silences dissent, and asks: who were they meant to fight for?

Island Fever

Drawing on films made by Chinese state studios in the 1950s–1980s, this work revisits island narratives of war, revolution, espionage, and class struggle once shaped to engineer shared sentiments. Images from these features are dismantled and recomposed as propaganda dissolves into tropical murmurs, blurring borders between history and fantasy, individual and collective.

A Fidai Film

In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut, raiding the Palestinian Research Centre and looting its entire archive. Containing historical documents and still and moving images of Palestine, the archive becomes the premise for A Fidai Film, which explores the visual memory of this looting through images now held in Israeli archives.

Through the Graves the Wind Is Blowing

In present-day Split, detective Ivan Peric dodges a career in tourism only to chase the deaths it leaves behind. Assigned to a string of unwanted tourist murders, he encounters indifference, obstruction and public scorn. His futile investigation mirrors a society still marked by post-Yugoslav disillusion, where bureaucracy buries facts and justice ranks below resentment.

Koki, Ciao

This experimental autobiography is narrated by Koki, a long-lived parrot kept beside Marshal Tito, who ruled Yugoslavia for over 35 years. Drawing on four years of recordings and newly revealed state archives, the film returns to Brijuni Island, where animals once served as diplomatic symbols. Koki recounts a life of political spectacle, now continuing in tourist captivity.

The Othered Scene

When words pass from one person to another, whose do they become? Revisiting a post-war plague on Quemoy, memories of a survivor gather drifting fragments: a 16mm travelogue, charcoal drawings, electronic sound, and spoken testimony, forming a layered meditation on transmission and the unstable ownership of stories.

To Alexandra

A collage of letters and intertwined journeys across time. As explorer and writer Alexandra David-Néel recounts her Himalayan passage a century ago, a filmmaker reflects on encounters in Eastern Tibet. Across different media, both examine their positions as outsiders, dwelling on historical wounds and a self reshaped by the high plateau.

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