One night, kept awake by highway construction outside his window, the filmmaker realises that a road will soon cut through his hometown, Xiangzidian Village. He sets up a camera to document the process, as the building site becomes a modern stage where his family’s joys and sorrows, partings and reunions play out.
LA PALOMA
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.
XiXi
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.
Scenes from Departure
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.
Colour Ideology Sampling.mov
Colour plays a powerful symbolic role in political expression. Through conversations on political hues — from ‘Hong Kong yellow’ to ‘Taiwan blue’ — the film examines whether such colours can coexist, and how they differ across contexts. By analysing individual colour samples, it reveals the complexity and plurality behind political symbolism.
Kabul, Between Prayers
Raised within Taliban ideology, twenty-three-year-old Samim lives between promises of martyrdom and the ordinariness of farming and family life. His teenage brother Rafi idolises him and those promises, the only vision of the world they have ever known.
Nocturnes
In the forests of the Eastern Himalayas, two curious observers explore a nocturnal world of moths, illuminating a fragile ecosystem on the India–Bhutan border. Immersive and contemplative, the film invites us to attend to hidden connections within the natural world.
Hair, Paper, Water…
Born in a cave more than sixty years ago, Cao Thi Hau now cares for her extended family in a village, dreaming of her dead mother calling her home. Through intimate moments, the film observes daily life, hardship and the fragile transmission of the Ruc language to younger generations.
TRƯƠNG Minh Quý and Nicolas Graux: ‘Water trickles through dark caves, drop by drop. Drops of memory pass from Mrs. Hậu to her grandchildren, word by word. Frame by frame, water carries them, carries us, carries the film — homeward.’
CycleMahesh
Four years after cycling two thousand kilometres home during the first Covid lockdown, construction worker Mahesh becomes the subject of a film about his journey. Yet as shooting ends and he returns to the labyrinth of his job site, a quieter portrait emerges. Blending fact and fiction, this film-within-a-film reflects on migrant labour and the ethics of looking.
Until the Orchid Blooms
Neang, an Indigenous woman in northeastern Cambodia, watches her village disappear beneath a hydroelectric dam. As industrial and state forces pressure families to leave ancestral lands, she struggles to hold her community together while her children’s futures drift away from traditional ways of life.
Polen Ly: ‘The experience of filming Until the Orchid Blooms over six years went beyond filmmaking; it became a journey that allowed me to form a deep emotional bond with Neang’s family and her Indigenous community.
TIDF Award-winning Films
Don't miss out the rare chance to revisit the twelve award-winning titles from the 2026 TIDF!