2002

French director Chris Marker traces the long and difficult career of Soviet communist filmmaker Aleksandr Ivanovic Medvedkin (1900-1989) by exploring his lost and re-discovered work, digging through a mass of archival material and by interviewing his friends, family and colleagues. Le Tombaeu D'Alexandre is poetically didactic, a documentary exploring the history of the United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) and, simultaneously, the history of Soviet cinema.

In the land of Samba, soccer is likened to a form of dance. In this film, an epic, comprised of rare and precious footage, we revisit the two big stars of the game: Pele and Garrincha. They are both Brazilian idols and government and propaganda tools. Their myth began life in 1958 and their life, career and personal destiny become tightly interwoven with the destiny of their nation. Born in poverty, they became 'a alegria do povo' (the pleasure of people). They are Brazilian symbols impossible to be replaced.

Spanning over a period of 10 years, this film is about a group of workers who stood up in protest against an illegal factory shutdown. In May 1992, Chin-Shiang Textile employees suffered various assaults by their company from salary cuts to unexplained demotion and the sudden shutdown of the factory. From reticence to picketing the factory, the dispute escalated to public demonstrations and even the active involvement and guidance of professionals from Taiwan’s Worker’s Movement. The process of their fight wrote down the first page in the history of Taiwan’s labor movement.

The stains of Bach’s solo cello and the voice of narrator CHENG Wen-Tang take us back to 1989, stirring up memories of CHENG Nan-Jung and the Freedom Era Weekly Magazine office where he burned himself to death. At 9:05 AM on April 7, CHENG Nan-Jung’s charred body declared his resolve to contribute himself to this land and his love for the people. The activist thinker CHENG Nan-Jung opened up many new directions for Taiwan on the road to freedom. Through this film we come to understand why it is that CHENG’s death has had such a tremendous and lasting influence on Taiwanese society.

WANG Yung-Ching’s Formosa Plastics is located in Chichin. Formosa Chemical is located in Changhua. In 1989, Formosa Chemical’s Ilan Plant began releasing black smoke after dark. Living standers became unbearable. Unable to resolve these problems, Formosa Plastic wants to build a sixth naphtha cracking plant. Director YU Chien-Yu hails from Yilan, and both times Formosa Plastics tried to set up a factory there, he used his images as his declaration that Kaohsiung was against the fifth naphtha cracker and certainly is against the sixth.