How Long Is the Road

In 'Etolan, a coastal Indigenous community in eastern Taiwan, the director and Amis artist Siki Sufin uncover their fathers' shared displacement. They trace a vanished generation of Taiwanese Indigenous youth taken to China during the civil war, bearing witness to the long-silenced histories of surviving veterans.

Tang Shiang-chu: 'It was an absurd time. For most soldiers, the future amounted to little more than pinning or removing a badge from their caps. Young lives vanished in violence across the Taiwan Strait, their ties to home severed, drifting like kites without strings.

How Deep Is the Ocean. How High Is the Mountain. How Long Is the Road — ten years passed like a single breath. The protagonists of my previous two documentaries, a close friend and my father, are both gone. Before this nameless unease, I am left without words. Siki Sufin's chant expresses why we make documentaries; his ceremony becomes a quiet summation of the past decade of my work, and of the kindness of those who walked this long road beside me.’

— Excerpted and translated from 'The Afterword to How Long Is the Road', Taiwan Docs Documentary Archive