台灣競賽

A friendship born from a shared longing for freedom unfolds into a mirrored journey of self-reinvention between two women artists. As creation, care and constraint interweave across generations, the film reflects on desire and vulnerability, healing and resilience, asking whether freedom can coexist with love — and where its limits might lie.

Amid Hong Kong’s 2019 upheaval, a message from his father suspends a filmmaker in emotional stasis. During the subsequent pandemic lockdown, separated across borders, father and son connect through prolonged video calls. Between silences and fragmented memories, the film traces two men struggling to reach one another through trauma and unspoken grief.

Known as ‘Pa Nana’, a celebrated Latin singer in 1950s–60s Taiwan, Kao Chu-hua supported her family through nightclub performances after her father’s execution during the White Terror. Drawing on family testimonies and newly declassified archives, the film reconstructs her life under state surveillance, revealing survival beneath authoritarian rule and enforced silence.

Fifteen chapters unfold across the Bunun villages of Litu and Wulu in Taitung, Taiwan, and the surrounding mountains and forests. Children dream of chasing — or being chased by — spirit animals; elders recall lives shaped by snake and bear myths; strange encounters emerge in the habitats of birds.

Before people settled in the mountains of Houtong, monkeys lived in a cave, and the mountain god sent ghostly flames to guard hidden treasures. Drawing on local myths and whispered histories of this faded mining town, the film departs from documentary convention and weaves uncanny tales through evocative sound and image.