Tracing the Borders of Reality: The Bodyscape of Contemporary Taiwanese Documentaries
Diversity has gradually lost its usefulness as a way of describing recent Taiwanese documentaries, as it no longer adequately captures the nuanced visions filmmakers bring to the screen. After all, diversity has effectively become a given — extending from filmmakers' backgrounds into their subjects and formal approaches. This raises a question: how might we speak of this year's Taiwan Competition at TIDF in a way that more closely reflects the forms of experience and imagination these films generate?
From a quantitative perspective, this year's shortlist of fifteen films includes thirteen women and seven men directors — nearly double in number. While this is partly due to several co-directed works, it also reflects the growing presence of women filmmakers within the contemporary Taiwanese documentary landscape. Their works are also no longer confined to 'challenging' or 'escaping binary frameworks of gendered perception'. Instead, they adopt more open approaches to rethinking the body, the bereaved and politics as fixed categories. XiXi (2024) traces the protagonist's search for freedom, as it competes with experiences of violence to be inscribed in the body’s memory. The filmmaker's own physical presence also enters the frame as a coordinate — at times a point of reference, at others a shaping force. In Where the Sea Breeze Blows (2024), asynchronous sound and image scatter across the screen, reanimating a decommissioned ship and the people connected to it. We are prompted to look again: those who remain stay before our eyes, while those who have left settle into an inner landscape. Meanwhile, the subjectivity of a younger generation comes into view in Colour Ideology Sampling.mov (2024), where political labelling produces a persistent sense of unreality across shifting situations.
'From bodily presence to dispersing subjectivity' outlines a key spectrum across this year's selection. Questions of embodiment and subject formation are not merely theoretical concerns, but attempts to restore dignity to those long deprived of voice. LA PALOMA (2026) takes the form of a belated letter of understanding towards those who suffered under the White Terror, compelling viewers to confront their own position between knowledge and ignorance, and to reflect on transitional justice as a public process. At the same time, it raises a further question: how might the wounds exposed in the name of justice begin to heal? If revelation marks the first step in acknowledging those who have been oppressed, the next is to make space for forms of existence beyond victimhood. Between the Shores (2025)extends this gesture by foregrounding the lived presence and continuity of migrant workers. In SPI (2025), the question of transmission is addressed with clarity: from the formation of first words to the reconstruction of mountain memory, language and craft become pathways through which culture is carried forward, allowing dream and reality to coexist as forms of cultural continuity. Mrs. Islets (2025)turns towards another mode of being. Here, isolation does not preclude solidarity. Rather than reducing island life to fleeting images, the camera becomes part of it — inhabiting the rhythms of daily routines and casual exchanges, which in turn reflect the labour of women. In this sustained negotiation between separation and rootedness, the women emerge as a stabilising force, holding fast to what endures while contending with the condition of departure — one that continues to shimmer.
The movement from bodily presence towards dispersal is also a process shaped by departure — what is left behind becomes fragmentary traces through which the absent may be re-imagined. Images, sounds, photographs and words remain. In Scenes from Departure (2026), fleeting moments shared with the filmmaker’s father become a site of searching, where an unseen presence unexpectedly resonates within a frame. Presence, in turn, may be evoked through sound. In Man Mei (2025), a sequence of photographs, interwoven with the narration of later generations, reconstructs the obscured lives of women long hidden in history. The Tales of the Tale (2025) transforms miners' testimonies into an unofficial history, where abandoned mining sites — once marked by state power — are now inhabited by ghost-like narratives. In Bone Always Outlasts Feather (2025), sound itself becomes the subject, drawing the audience into the gift of the natural soundscape. Children's dreams and experiences imbue the film with a mythic sensibility towards nature. Where Clouds Once Formed (2025) adopts a contemporary ecological perspective within the framework of the Anthropocene, issuing a warning from a non-human point of view. In the starkness of an arid landscape, set against the juxtaposition of Indigenous displacement and technological exploitation, the imprints of what is often termed Taiwan's 'silicon shield' — its semiconductor-driven state protection — become starkly visible, unsettling in their intensity.
At the shifting boundary between reality and fiction, filmmakers mobilise documentary images within fictional constructions, channel documentary impulses into image-making, or allow fiction to emerge through the recording of everyday life. In Paper Houses and Horses (2025), ritual specialists working in funeral practices move between the realms of the living and the dead, the imagined and the real, guiding those who have departed too soon. Amateur in the Moon (2025) reactivates a century-old home-movie device, using archival materials to evoke the romance of an earlier amateur filmmaking era. Jouhatsu Letters (2024) takes the form of an exchange video diary between two filmmakers, in which everyday images give rise to a fugue-like dialogue. Through the photochemical medium, fleeting moments are transformed, allowing the work to drift freely between documentary and fiction — expanding, dissolving and reforming in continuous flux.
Reality, however, still implies boundaries. The rapid transformation of contemporary audiovisual technologies has generated increasingly complex forms of image-making, mediality, performance and spectatorship, resulting in a more intricate documentary landscape. In this context, reality must be continually re-examined through acts of image-making, as it is negotiated across the terrain where fiction and non-fiction intersect. This redefinition does not seek to establish a fixed truth, but to trace the ghost-like imprints that persist within the unfolding temporality of the moving image. Between embodiment and disembodiment, documentary images reveal the subtle luminosity of their material forms, as subjectivity disperses and reconstitutes itself. It is within the tension between revelation and disappearance that reality assumes its most compelling contemporary form. In tracing these borders, the fifteen films in this year's Taiwan Competition engage in perceptual experiments that also delineate the evolving practices of a 'bodyscape' in Taiwanese documentary.
Translated by Yen Wang-yun
