Schedule

Every morning, hundreds of cows are herded to a landfill site in Indonesia, relying on human food waste for sustenance. They eat, nap, play, mate, even spending the night here, while having to keep themselves safe from the excavators and bulldozers that plough around the site. No matter how different their life experiences are, all these rubbish-eating cows will share the same destiny under the butcher’s knife.

A lone stranger broadcasts fragments of life he has experienced from different time and space, hoping to make a connection and communicate with other beings of life. Like a time capsule, this film contains artefacts of the first Filipinos, a family, a political upheaval, and the existence / non-existence of God, in an interactive and very obtrusive form rarely seen in conventional Filipino documentaries. Scan the QR Codes before and after the film for more hidden messages!

Nine-year-old Ayana is determined to become the first girl player in the history of kok-boru, a traditional Central Asian horseback game of warriors. Despite obstacles along the way, support from her family helps Ayana to believe in herself and live her dream.

In 2009, the director enjoyed an unforgettable self-driving tour in northwest Guangdong, China. He revisited the same sites with his college roommate in 2016, meditating on the ideas of people, places, and serendipity. Narrated in colloquial Cantonese, this personal road film operates on a topography of memories, reconstructing and retelling the travellers' youth as well as the hidden histories of the Pearl River Delta region.

Dear Photograph (Sashingwa) is an artistic elaboration on TAKAMINE Go’s first solo exhibition, featuring a series of hand-tinted photographs, some of which directly came from his family album. The director’s 8mm camera lingers over the family portraits, as if in imitation of a common experience: touching photos of personal significance by hand. These visual materials and subject matters will be constantly revisited in TAKAMINE’s later films.

With childhood friend OTA Kazuhito (Tarugani) as his sound man, TAKAMINE Go captures on 8mm film the everyday landscape of Okinawa right after the reversion to Japan, and the scent of death from his parents’ haunting memories of the Battle of Okinawa. Inspired by Jonas MEKAS’s Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972), the non-narrative form and intermittent slow motion make Okinawan Dream Show a visual poetry beyond a déjà vu.

In 2013, the director was hired to produce a short film on the causes and treatment of osteoarthritis among the elderly, yet the award-winning film was soon embroiled in an unexpected copyright controversy with the commissioning organisation. This self-reflexive documentary questions not only the notions of artistic reproduction and intellectual property rights in the digital age, but also the 'ownership' of democracy in Thailand.

In an old myth, at the centre of the Earth is a black tree. Those who can reach it will be able to talk to the trees and break curses. Martín is an indigenous Qom shepherd in Argentina. His community, Santo Domingo, is threatened by corporate agriculture taking over their traditional territory. When Martín's goats begin to die out without cause, in between assemblies and roadblocks, Martín must decide whether to respond to the black tree's call.

The first episode of Fragrant Formosa takes viewers through one of the most famous annual religious events in Taiwan. Believers used to spend eight days accompanying the sea goddess Mazu from Dajia (of Taichung City) to Beigang (of Yunlin County) on foot, before escorting her back to Dajia with rituals and celebrations. In this digitally restored version, the film is reunited with its original audio track in Taiwanese, which was banned on release due to the KMT government's Mandarin policy.

A train rolled into Tamsui, a charming harbour town full of historical and cultural complexity. European-style architecture tells its colonial past, while Fujianese immigrants' influence stays present in local people's everyday life. Celebrated photographer and cinematographer CHANG Chao-tang captured Tamsui in the 1970s on film, creating a nostalgic yet melancholic concerto played by missionaries, fishermen, and tourists.

The riverbanks are dotted with food stalls and buzzing with the parasol-holding crowd. Everyone is here to watch the exciting dragon boat race. Voice-over narration in melodic Taiwanese describes pre-festival preparation, and the celebrations and rituals in various parts of Taiwan. Through carefully-crafted script and well-executed camerawork, this documentary gives a vibrant portrait of ordinary people’s lives in a festive atmosphere.

In 1971, Dušan MAKAVEJEV's daring and innovative political satire film, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, was condemned in a public debate in Yugoslavia under the auspices of the Communist Party, leading to MAKAVEJEV's exile from his home country and the blacklisting of the film. Paying homage to one of the greatest Eastern European filmmakers, this documentary 'plays back' the incident at the original site, seeking to redress the oppression and injustice in a 'democracy' without true freedom.

In 1972, astronaut Charles DUKE landed on the Moon on the Apollo 16 mission, in charge of taking photos of the lunar surface with a high-resolution camera. From the exploration of space to cyberspace, from an analogue Moon in 1972 to a virtual Moon in Google Earth today, this film is a meditation on the human perspective on Earth and the constant struggle with our temporal and spatial limitations; a story about parallel universes where eternity seems to be lost between frames and interfaces.

'Mama has two phone numbers. We do not talk about immigration on her “Obama phone”. For that we use the other number with no data plan', says the narrator as he crosses the United States by train. From Los Angeles to New York, multiple voices share thoughts, dreams and histories that evoke images far away from the enclosed interior of the train, creating a site of precarious movement, migration, and fugitivism.

In 1974, the filmmaker began his 23-year journey of filming the women workers in a newly built textile factory in the town of Wittstock, East Germany. Life in Wittstock is the fifth instalment in the series; by then, nearly 3,000 women were working in the factory. In this film, three of the workers talk about the changes in the town, their promotions at work, and the choices and compromises they have made in their lives over the years.

Although the director had planned to end the Wittstock documentary series at Life in Wittstock, he continued the project to capture the changes taking place in East Germany after the German reunification. This sixth instalment returns to the town shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The three women workers experience various forms of instability and upheaval when the factory is liquidated; Edith leaves and start a new life in Württemberg.

Seven-year-old Zakhar lives on the vast Siberian tundra in the Arctic, hundreds of miles away from other human settlements. One day, his nomad family is joined by a teacher, sent by the authorities to explain to Zakhar and his brother Prokopy why they need mathematics and PUTIN. The teacher is supposed to give them a standard set of knowledge, but Zakhar's inquiring mind craves answers to millions of questions about the world.

The year was 2011: In Wukan, a village in Guangdong, China, corrupted officials had illegally sold the villagers’ land, and the villagers decided to fight back. From the outset of the protest, first-time documentary filmmaker Jill LI embedded herself in the community of Wukan for several years. She chronicled the complex experiences of three key figures in the movement, examining an unprecedented experiment in grassroots democracy and its fallout.

A storm was brewing in the early hours of 1 July 2019—the 22nd anniversary of the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong. Facing the absurdity of the Hong Kong Government's indoor flag-raising ceremony, protesters questioned the effectiveness of peaceful protest. They stormed the Legislative Council Complex as a last-ditch effort to ignite change in the Anti-ELAB Movement. Violent street clashes with the police continued deep into the night.

A loose collection of scenes in Hong Kong shot over a five-year period, this film begins with the Umbrella Movement in 2014 and ends right before the summer of 2019, when large-scale social unrest and violent resistance erupted. The everyday scenes capture the ambience and the landscape of change in the city, standing as a quiet prelude to the ensuing conflicts.

Through processing a year of bewildering news and images from my home in Hong Kong, I've come to question the significance of dear memories and personal joy in the face of things falling apart. As the days teeter toward an uncertain future, Happy Valley cinematically probes the role of the so-called ‘little things’. A rendering of the perseverance of spirit in Hong Kong - an attempt at irony that can’t help but be emotional.

The Anti-ELAB Movement came to a horrifying peak in mid-November at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. When protesters blocking the Cross-Harbour Tunnel retreated to the University, the police surrounded the area and put the school in a lockdown. Anxious citizens made various rescue attempts, but could barely go near the campus. Meanwhile, within those red brick walls, the camera captured the trapped protesters’ desperation and determination.

In 2016, a group of performers from Clowns Without Borders, including the director’s own sister, traveled to the Greek island of Lesbos to bring laughter to the waves of refugees crossing the sea to escape from war. They were greeted instead with closed gates, witnessing firsthand the effects of the European Union's new refugee policies. The director joined them on their journey, which gradually became a reflection on the sisters’ own tale of displacement during the Lebanese Civil War.

In the mid-1980s, during the Lebanese Civil War, I witnessed the kidnapping of a man I knew. He has remained missing ever since. Ten years ago, I caught a glimpse of his face while walking down a street in Beirut; under layers and layers of ripped posters on a wall, parts of his face were torn off. I want to restore the man's features, even though the city has been striving to erase the traces and trails of those who disappeared beyond recovery.

In June 1992, the management of Jia-long Clothing closed down its domestic factory to transfer its capital and manufacturing department to Indonesia, right after its labour union in Taiwan was formed. The employer, CHU Ying-long, then a professor at the National Taiwan University, refused to provide statutory severance pay for the 130-plus women workers thrown into unemployment. The desperate workers decided to take to the streets. We pay tribute to director LEE Meng-zhe, who passed away in 2018, with the screening of this prominent Taiwanese labour documentary of the 1990s.

Blurring the line between reality and fantasy, TAKAMINE’s signature style of storytelling has already taken shape in this feature film debut. Set in Okinawa on the eve of reversion and filmed almost entirely in the endangered Okinawan language, the story revolves around a man who has quit his job at a U.S. military base and an ethnographer (acted by renowned Japanese musician HOSONO Haruomi) who attempts to marry a village woman in the traditional Ryukyu customs.

A classic 1956 French documentary short, fully restored. Directed by Alain RESNAIS in collaboration with scriptwriter Jean CAYROL, a survivor of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp himself, the film features the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek established in occupied Poland, while describing the lives of prisoners in the camps. The title is taken from the Nacht und Nebel program of abductions and disappearances decreed by Nazi Germany.

A close continuous view of a bowl of blueberries and milk. A spoon comes in and scoops up some of the berries, presumably to be eaten, until they are all gone. A malfunction with the camera motor of a rare 8mm Bolex produces a regular pulse against the slight flicker of the shutter at silent speed. This is my first real film; all the others rise out of this one.

I wanted to offer a rich experience of phenomena and associations from a continuous moving image the length of a roll of film. The transformation of ears of corn into sustenance takes place within a space/time theatre of light and shadow. The sinuous dance of steam rising from the cooked ears is a counterpart to the fog of Fog Line.

The fog lifts, but doesn't go from white to full clarity. It just shows a piece of time, a section of a slowly changing process in the landscape and in the mind of the viewer, for whom the mental fog could also lift. The lines of the wires relate to the controlling mind rather than the imagination; the implications of this contrast go right through my work.

Finally I moved the camera, in a slow pan from one side of the door of my wife's pottery studio to the other. While the camera is panning left, the visual sense is of the landscape features moving right. The doorway marks a plane separating the inside from the outside, as windows do in my other films.

I noticed a play of moving light between the slats of an old barn I passed every day. The film is made from a car window of eight passes across the barn, each the length of a 100-foot roll of film. The barn manifests itself: It is both passive, as I am with the camera, and active, almost alive.

The last of my continuous shot silent films. A very limited field of view with small sliding and focused motions, but lots to see in the snow. My previous films had grown out of formal ideas without much conscious concern with meaning, but I was becoming aware of the implications of these works, so I gave it this title.

This film is popular for the vibrant energy of Shelley the performer, the music, and the autumn landscape. As with the previous films, I myself am passive; the driver, the car, and Shelley are the creative forces. He is the first of many avatars, doubles of me, that led to my later attraction to ceremonial possession.

In 2045, a man living on Mars examines footage brought back from his encounters with an indigenous community in the jungles of Vietnam. His thoughts drift from ritual burial practices, issues of identities, the politics and aesthetics of image-making, to the seen and unseen forces that shape cultures. Combining elements of science fiction and ethnography, The Tree House is a powerful exploration of how time and environment relate to our understanding of home.

16-year-old Alessandro and Pietro live in the gang-ravaged Traiano region of Naples, where in 2014, a teenager Davide BIFOLCO was gunned down by a policeman. These two inseparable friends accept the director's proposal to film themselves with an iPhone, recording and commenting on their daily experiences, their own neighbourhood—now empty in the middle of summer – and the tragedy that ended Davide's life.

Born in Abkhazia, marionette artist Sipa LABAKHUA had to flee with his family to Moscow when the USSR collapsed. Years later, Sipa returned to his small and unrecognised birthplace, taking to the road with his autobiographical one-man marionette show, provoking audiences from different backgrounds with his own history of displacement and war. Combining elements from documentary, fiction and animation, this road film sheds a poetic light on the highly topical questions: What makes a country? What is home?

When Taipei is still quiet and asleep, trucks after trucks emerge in the dark with fresh fruits and vegetables, seafood and meat. Intermediate wholesalers' auction chants rise and fall; the Central Market is getting ready to feed the city's population. The film offers a glimpse into the lively hustle and bustle of the Market in the 1970s, but was likely banned from broadcast due to its perceived display of the unhygienic conditions.

Zhonggang, a former commercial harbour in Miaoli County once suffering from sedimentation and decline, thrived again with its joss paper (ghost money) industry. Almost every family was part of it: Different generations worked together, attaching gold foils and stamping the paper in red ink, before sending it to dry. When massive stacks of golden joss paper basked in the sun, the town seemed to be covered in dreamy golden waves.

Situated in the hills leading down to the coast, Ruifang used to pride itself on its coal mining industry. Every morning, miners from surrounding neighbourhoods gathered here to put on their gears and got into the minecarts, heading underground into pitch darkness. They worked non-stop in challenging conditions of high stress and high temperature, providing Taiwan with an indispensable source of energy. This documentary celebrates the miners’ contribution, but also stirred up controversy due to its inaccurate report of their wages.

Ada was 19. A man she knew invited her to dinner and she accepted. Everything went wrong so quickly before she could even think to defend herself. With her body and mind in tatters, Ada returned twice to confront the perpetrator. Intertwined with other people's experiences, different yet at the same time so chillingly similar, Ada's story, as written by her own hand, is not only a personal catastrophe, but part of a wide-ranging social violence.

A new kind of normality has taken hold in Wittstock, which the filmmaker has captured for us for the one last time. The big factory is no longer there. As for the three women workers, Elsbeth goes to retraining courses, always on the hunt for a job; Renate has now been working for five years as a chambermaid in a small hotel; Edith, who used to be so rebellious, has moved to Heilbronn for work and become very tranquil.

Spring, 1989: For exactly 100 years, the brick-making industry has determined the rhythms of life in Zehdenick, a small town north of Berlin in the state of Brandenburg. Veteran and young brickmakers speak openly and critically about their working and living conditions. As the first instalment of Volker KOEPP's March Brandenburg trilogy, this film was premiered in October 1989, one month before the fall of the Berlin Wall, at the Mannheim Film Festival in West Germany.

The second instalment of March Brandenburg trilogy captures the conversations taking place in Zehdenick during the weeks leading up to the first free elections in spring 1990. Including previously censored footage of March Brandenburg Bricks, this film reflects the hopes and concerns of the business community, working class women, and young people during 'Die Wende', the period of political change in East Germany.

This film is a visual record of long-lasting open wounds, and the disappearance of collective memory. The director examines the current plight of a group of elderly Chinese peasants, who, as civilians, have been made victims of the Imperial Japanese Army's lethal human experimentation in Northeast China, suffering from the festering wounds for over 70 years. The director also visits some surviving soldiers of Unit 731——Japan's notorious regiment devoted to biological warfare during World War II.

A Fight to the Death traces the decades-long battle fought by the former residents of Baoshan Township in Hsinchu County, Taiwan. 36 years ago, due to the government's expropriation of lands to build the Baoshan Reservoir serving the Hsinchu Science Park, the villagers were forced to leave their homes. Paranoia and anxiety set the tone of this drawn-out battle against institutions, and the truth remains clouded.

Due to its proximity to the No. 6 Naphtha Cracker Complex, the Ciaotou Elementary School Syucuo Branch in Mailiao, Yunlin County, has relocated its students four times within three years for fear of health risks. It is said that Kisses and Hugs, a newspaper praising the benefits and prosperity brought by the petrochemical industry, is delivered monthly to local households. Through this publication, this film examines the complex relationship between the industry and the local community.

This film centres around three condemned prisoners who have committed different crimes: One is still serving his sentence; another has taken his own life while imprisoned; the last one has already been executed. Using news footage and unembellished interviews, the director shows his concern for the prisoners and their families as fellow human beings, examines the contemporary history of death penalty in Taiwan, and further questions the current judicial system.

This experimental documentary opens with a family anecdote: When coming across my grandmother’s painting in a random Chinese restaurant in the States, my aunt burst into tears. Using this anecdote as its axis, the film wanders through Cold War constructions, Taiwan–United States relations, generations of diaspora, family romances and ghost stories, while my family’s personal and collective memories are transformed into another tale of 'the Flying Dutchman', doomed to sail the oceans forevermore.

With 35mm still photographs obsessively tape-spliced together, one frame at a time, E-ticket is a frantic re-cataloguing and re-editing of a personal archive for the rebirth of forgotten images. Scenes shift from a school trip to India, to a violent 2005 protest at a World Trade Organisation summit in Hong Kong. A retelling of Dante's Inferno for the streaming age.

Two decades after the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997, the files concerning the Sino-British negotiations are finally declassified, revealing key information never known to Hongkongers. This film centres around four women volunteering for Decoding Hong Kong’s History, a project digitising records of the Handover from the British National Archives, and the women’s thoughts on identity, diaspora, and their home in troubled times.

West Estate spotlights the severe housing problems in Hong Kong, taking the spirit of resistance outside of the protest. The damaged walls in the cage-like tenements reflect the many forms of social injustice as well as Hongkongers’ widespread sense of rootlessness. Connecting three stories from different households like puzzle pieces, the film depicts people’s despair over issues of family, sexuality, love, and freedom.

This Anti-ELAB (Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill) Movement documentary short takes us back to the airport occupation on 12 August 2019. Although this new form of protest soon turned into a crisis, it became an important lesson for the protesters. Compared to the tension inside the airport terminal, the long walk home at sunset on the Lantau highway, which connects the Hong Kong International Airport to the residential areas, felt like a reminiscence of a school field trip.

Mr. LIN is a happily retired man who spends his time keeping company with his toddling grandson, walking his dog, and playing golf with his in-laws. Recently, he has been obsessed with houses with river views. In LIN's city of demolitions and reconstructions, money-making investors buy and sell houses at unaffordable prices. Above the skyline of Taipei, will the boundaries between daydreams and reality ever blur?

Gubuk (Hut) is an experimental project growing out of Indonesian migrant workers' personal experiences in Taiwan. Gathering in a staged hut built out of abandoned materials from a factory, the workers retell and re-enact their own stories under fabricated identities. In this space where fiction intersects with reality, they share tales of escape, of loss, and of suffering.

KIM Ryun-hee, a North Korean housewife, was forced to come to South Korea and became its citizen against her will. She tried to smuggle herself out of the country, even sought political asylum at the Vietnamese Embassy, but all her efforts were in vain. As her seven years of struggle to return to her family in the North continues, political absurdity hinders her journey back to her loved ones.

For over 50 years, a civil war has been waged between the Shan people, the largest ethnic minority group in Burma, and the Burmese military. Jai Sang Lod, a young stateless Shan man living in the disputed borderlands between Burma and Northern Thailand, reluctantly submits himself to become a soldier for the Shan State Army. Trained to fight for Shan sovereignty as a lifetime duty, he yearns for a piece of identification and a steady living.

A contemporary adaptation of a popular play in the Uchinaa Shibai (Okinawan theatre), this film features a blue-collar factory worker who transforms into Untamagiru, a local Robin Hood figure, on the eve of Okinawa's reversion to Japan. Considered TAKAMINE Go's representative work, Untamagiru presents a balanced critique through a light-hearted folktale that situates the Okinawan conundrum in between class struggles and colonial exploitation.

A collage of scenes in the periphery of film sets and locations in Manila made to look like a fictional piece, a gift to a baby named Aki Tala who will grow and watch her father's work for the first time.

People Power Bombshell: The Diary of Vietnam Rose is a behind-the-scenes account of The Diary of Vietnam Rose, a film left unfinished by the late Filipino master director Celso Advento CASTILLO. On the basis of 20 recovered rolls of never-before-seen footage of the film shot at the time of the People Power Revolution of 1986, director John TORRES interviewed the original cast and crew on their distressing experiences on the island during the film’s production, including the possible harassment endured by the then 19-year-old actress, Liz ALINDOGAN. Mixing found footage with newly shot scenes and sound snippets extracted from the cast interviews, this documentary is an imaginative homage to a lost classic and the seductive power of filmmaking.

Laika, a stray dog, was the first living being sent into the outer space and a certain death. According to a legend, her ghost has returned to the Earth and roamed the streets of Moscow ever since. Interwoven with Soviet archive materials from the Space Race, this magical documentary is filmed at the eye level of a dog, following Laika's poignant trail and accompanying her spiritual descendants, a pack of street dogs, on their poetic yet brutal adventures in today's Moscow.

Guillaume SUON's mother always refused to speak about her childhood during the Cambodian genocide. Seeking to understand her experiences, Guillaume and his brother began to film Antoine, a photographer and a grandson of Armenian genocide survivors, following him to the Middle East to photograph the ghosts of his ancestors. Antoine’s journey in turn paved the way for the brothers’ quest back to Cambodia—with their mother.   With support from  

Eleven Men is composed of scenes from a range of Vietnamese classic films featuring the same central actress, Như Quỳnh. Spanning three decades of her legendary acting career, most of the appropriated movies—from 1966 to 2000—were produced by the state-owned Vietnam Feature Film Studio. Inspired by ‘Eleven Sons’, a short story by Franz KAFKA first published in 1919, wherein a father declares he has ‘eleven sons’ and then describes each of them in acute and ironic detail, this film begins with a woman stating: ‘I have eleven men’.

Different versions of the same history—one personal, another depicted by cinema, the third described by the media—are laid on top of each other and collapsed. Mixing footage from Hong Kong movies of the 1980s and 1990s with wire service footage of the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese refugee crisis in Hong Kong from the late 1970s to 1997, and an interview with the owner of Paul’s Records in Hong Kong, Everyday's the Seventies continues to explore the director’s interests in gaps and disconnection between personal memories, history, and other kinds of collective histories.

The late Māori filmmaker Barry BARCLAY, who first introduced the concept of ‘Fourth Cinema’ to distinguish indigenous cinema from the established ‘First, Second, and Third Cinema’ framework, provides the text and structure to director NGUYEN Trinh Thi’s hybrid essay film that moves on multiple cinematic and topical terrains. Eschewing voice in favour of the written word and juxtaposing moving images of the director’s own daughter with archival images of Vietnamese women seen through the lens of the ‘ship’s officers’, the film leads the viewer through a narrative of colonialism, indigeneity, and cinematic limitations in representation.

Chin-song and Xiao-shah are getting married. The joyous couple’s loving confessions and their aspirations in life are captured in close-up shots. Juxtaposing the interior shots of the newlyweds’ apartment with rooftop views, the director also depicts how they react when confronted with domestic and financial realities. When documenting the life of Chin-song, a fellow male cameraman, director LEE Meng-zhe returns from scenes of social activism to reflection and exploration of the self.

When a child comes into their lives, how will a couple adjust to the changes? This film can be seen as a sequel to Chin-song and Xiao-shah’s Wedding Plaza: It opens with their expectations for married life, and then presents Chin-song’s monologue in black-and-white chiaroscuro, leading its audience through the passage of life. This film was made during the director’s master’s study, and will welcome its festival debut at TIDF.

In this century-spanning family saga, Janna Ji WONDERS embarks on a voyage of discovery. She takes us from the family cafe at the Lake Walchen (Walchensee) in the Bavarian Alps, to San Francisco in 1967, where the infamous 'Summer of Love' took place. Tracking down each link in the chain, this documentary is a timeless family story about women from three generations and their search for identity, their self-realisation, love, loss, birth, and death.

The grey mullet is known for its roe, a beloved delicacy in Taiwan. Every year around the winter solstice, schools of grey mullet migrate south to spawn. When the cold current hits Taiwan, so comes the grey mullet. In order to catch the precious ‘black gold’ at dawn, local fishermen set out in the thick mist and follow the mullet in the dark. This documentary focuses on the mullet industry and captures the 300-year-old tradition of mullet fishing.

Legend has it that the fish in the Sun Moon Lake was transformed from a white deer, and it’s why indigenous people started to eat fish. A large serpent living inside an ancient camphor tree was said to be the guardian of the lake. Also famous are the Buddhist relics of the monk Xuanzang enshrined in the eponymous Temple, and the over 400 peacocks kept in the local bird park... Here, intriguing folktales keep unfolding one after another.

In the 1970s, the wave of modernisation hit the Orchid Island (Lanyu). Warship Rock, Double Lion Rock, Lover’s Cave, the wisely and artistically designed tatala (traditional fishing boat), along with the Tao people’s amazing fishing skills were well-known by the public through the growing tourism, yet the small island of Lanyu and Tao people’s indigenous ways of life still remained a ‘spectacle’. When the documentary film crew arrived with curiosity and good intentions, what stories would they tell together?

I grew up in an ashram, a spiritual hermitage in India, of which I had to keep silent. I was taught to dedicate my life to the Guru, so I could understand the 'truth' of life and become enlightened. About 20 years and a lot of therapy later, I set out on a journey to understand the secret I was forced to keep and to answer the questions I had throughout my life: Was I raised in a cult? What happened to the other ashram children?

Chernivtsi, a city in western Ukraine (Czernowitz in German) used to be the centre of the Jewish culture, but only a handful of its Jewish residents survived the concentration camps—Mr ZWILLING, the self-proclaimed pessimist, was one of them. Everyday, Mr ZWILLING visits the elderly Mrs ZUCKERMANN to speak German, to talk about Judaism and their city, and to reminisce about the war.

The final instalment of March Brandenburg trilogy moves away from the town of Zehdenick in order to focus on the rural areas north of Berlin. Made in the period between the currency union in East Germany and the official reunification in October 1990, the film shows how drastically the lives of the residents have changed, as crippling unemployment has taken the place of hard work.

Jerry, a 73-year-old world traveller from Britain, has settled in a rural community in Linyuan, Kaohsiung fifteen years ago. He only speaks of his past, because he cannot see much future for himself. His present centres around feeding the twenty-plus stray cats in his neighbourhood. Although Jerry has no savings, sometimes needing help with buying food for his cats, he has found peace and serenity in his life in Taiwan.

This documentary tells two different stories featuring ventilator-dependent patients in Taiwan and the people around them. Along with nearly 4,000 such cases on our island, these bedridden and mostly unconscious individuals are unable to communicate with the outside world, except through their ECG waves. Facing the dilemma of futile medical care, and the rights to live and die as one chooses, everyone has to make their own decision: Should they stay on or move on?

A busy nanny school in Indramayu, West Java, prepares women to work overseas in countries like Taiwan as domestic workers and caregivers. Every year, hundreds of women like Sukma, Meri, Muji, and Tari are recruited by local agents, who are then remunerated by the schools after successfully seeing their recruits enrolled. While the women bring income that can alleviate family poverty, are they really improving their lives? And at what cost?

Brothers Klaus, Wolf, Friedrich, and Rainer PAETZOLD were born in West Prussia between 1938 and 1944. Fleeing the Soviet Red Army in 1945, their mother managed to escape to the West with her two elder sons, but was forced to leave her two younger sons behind with their grandparents. Sons tells the story of this German-Polish family, spanning from the post-war period to the present day.

Immobile in a forever-outdated house, where the sands of time fall to the rhythm of rural Azerbaijani sounds, a mother waits for her son. When he arrives, their conversations circle around existential questions and news from afar, troubling and cryptic. Unrest cloaks the world outside. Mother and son grow closer, and renewed life springs between them.

What were you doing, when I took this photo as the train was passing by your house last year?' Carrying pictures taken from the train a year ago, the director returns to the same sites, asking this question of those who appear in the images. More often than not, people do not remember. Many things have changed in a year, but those fleeting moments and bygone memories are captured on film, sealed forever.

On a rainy afternoon, the filmmaker set out from a hospital and followed an elderly window screen repairman to Toad Hill, an old settlement on the outskirts of Taipei, helping him to find a woman from his past. On the dreamlike journey, the repairman discovered his long-forgotten and decayed memories of this metropoli

Under the regime of constant discipline and incorporation, rituals, faiths, bodies, and the relations between men and gods are all being uprooted. When time is dissected into infinitesimal parts in the gaze of a stopped frame, those links abandoned in the furious chase emerge again. Men and gods, destruction and rebirth, all gather here in search of a safe corner.

After encountering a series of setbacks in life, the filmmaker returned to her hometown, Chuncheon, South Korea, a place she was once desperate to forget and leave behind. She visited her hard-working mother and sought to untangle their complex mother-daughter relationship, while recapturing their family portrait in vanishing memories and spaces.

Bleak yet ultimately beautiful, Scheme Birds is a coming-of-age documentary, bursting with the frustration of a generation of Scots let down by society's promises. We see the fading steel town, Motherwell, through the eyes of Gemma, a soon-to-be mother on the verge of adulthood. In a place where you 'either get knocked up or locked up', Gemma carves out brief moments of tenderness amidst the violence of her local housing estate.

In the Dabao River basin, where the Llyong Topa indigenous community used to be, stands a 'ghost temple” where hundreds of Atayal people were buried. They fell victims to Japanese government's first wave of indigenous genocide during its colonial rule of Taiwan. The massacre occurred much earlier than the Wushe Incident (1930), yet still rarely known to the world. The filmmaker visited the mountains over a hundred times, seeking clues and traces to fill in the blanks of history.

This road film revolves around an Okinawan folk song singer Tsuru and her son Henry’s filmmaking journey. Taiwanese singers CHIN Man-wang, LEE Ping-huei, and acclaimed actress CHEN Shiang-chyi all make cameo appearances. After decoupling Okinawa from Japan in Okinawan Dream Show, Paradise View, and Untamagiru, TAKAMINE Go further unpacks the geopolitical complexities of Okinawa in Tsuru-Henry.

In the mid-1980s, during the Lebanese Civil War, I witnessed the kidnapping of a man I knew. He has remained missing ever since. Ten years ago, I caught a glimpse of his face while walking down a street in Beirut; under layers and layers of ripped posters on a wall, parts of his face were torn off. I want to restore the man's features, even though the city has been striving to erase the traces and trails of those who disappeared beyond recovery.

In 2013, the director was hired to produce a short film on the causes and treatment of osteoarthritis among the elderly, yet the award-winning film was soon embroiled in an unexpected copyright controversy with the commissioning organisation. This self-reflexive documentary questions not only the notions of artistic reproduction and intellectual property rights in the digital age, but also the 'ownership' of democracy in Thailand.

After restoring their Ceremony of Ancestral Spirits, the Atayal people of the Raisinay Village, Miaoli County, were distressed by the absence of their traditional garments. Yuma Taru, a researcher of Atayal folk costume, decided to trace back their history by conducting interviews with the elders, learning weaving techniques from them. This documentary captures the passing down of the weaving art, and the younger generation’s yearnings for revival of their traditional clothes.

ZHENG Jin-sheng of the Fata'an community , Hualien, lost his right hand and left leg in a childhood accident. A man with a positive attitude to life, he worked in carpentry, caught pond loaches, and enjoyed dancing with his people. Most impressive of all, he trained hard to become a wall-painting expert, leading a life devoted to his work.

A group of Pangcah people left their homeland in the eastern Taiwan to seek jobs on the western coast. They drifted from one construction site to another, until they finally settled on a temporarily unclaimed clearing behind a university, building a community far away from home. Despite the instability of work and earnings, they lived life to the fullest catching fish, growing vegetables, singing and dancing, even electing leaders of their community in this 'new paradise'.

In the 1920s, a Kavalan family took refuge in Hualien. 70 years later, the filmmaker, a third-generation member of the family, embarked on a self-searching journey to recover his lost identity, producing the first documentary ever made by a Pingpu descendant. Through depiction of traditional Kavalan ceremonies and collective memories, the film asks us to recognise Pingpu peoples’ place in Taiwanese history, as well as their suffering and feelings of inferiority during years of forced migration.

The film follows the story of A Mu Yi, who grew up in an indigenous community in Tai'an Township, Miaoli. She was arranged by her parents to marry a man twenty years older when she was just fourteen. For years, she suffered from domestic violence and alcohol addiction, eventually fleeing back to her hometown. Armoured with her faith, A Mu Yi rediscovered her inner strength to walk out of the darkness and began to help more indigenous women falling to similar fates.

In 1971, Dušan MAKAVEJEV's daring and innovative political satire film, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, was condemned in a public debate in Yugoslavia under the auspices of the Communist Party, leading to MAKAVEJEV's exile from his home country and the blacklisting of the film. Paying homage to one of the greatest Eastern European filmmakers, this documentary 'plays back' the incident at the original site, seeking to redress the oppression and injustice in a 'democracy' without true freedom.

In 2045, a man living on Mars examines footage brought back from his encounters with an indigenous community in the jungles of Vietnam. His thoughts drift from ritual burial practices, issues of identities, the politics and aesthetics of image-making, to the seen and unseen forces that shape cultures. Combining elements of science fiction and ethnography, The Tree House is a powerful exploration of how time and environment relate to our understanding of home.

In an old myth, at the centre of the Earth is a black tree. Those who can reach it will be able to talk to the trees and break curses. Martín is an indigenous Qom shepherd in Argentina. His community, Santo Domingo, is threatened by corporate agriculture taking over their traditional territory. When Martín's goats begin to die out without cause, in between assemblies and roadblocks, Martín must decide whether to respond to the black tree's call.

What is it like to abandon a home which carries traces from several generations? The short film shows an almost 300-square-metre apartment in the very centre of Helsinki and how it is being emptied, picture by picture.

The household of a Lisbon family is disbanded after a century. While the camera accompanies the further path of the furniture and objects left behind, a fragmentarily mounted exchange of letters off-screen bears witness to personal and historic tragedies.

The Pangcah people living in the urban area used to compete and win the dragon boat race every year, but only as hired agents in a festival event of the Han Taiwanese. In 1995, a team of Pangcah contestants decided to compete in the race under the names of their community and homeland, 'C'roh of Yuli, Hualien', striving for glory to honour their true origin.

Charged with violation of the Water Act, the indigenous community living under the San-ying Bridge was forced to witness their shelters and homes being torn down by the government every year, while the sand and gravel processing plant on the east bank grew larger and larger; the garbage mountain on the west bank higher and higher. This absurd cycle became so familiar that the children of the community began to build and demolish make-believe houses as a game.

Part oral history, part reflection on a culture at risk of being erased, this documentary presents a deep dialogue between a 94-year-old Pangcah chieftain and an indigenous filmmaker. Through words and songs, hunting trips and weaving of vines, the elderly chieftain lives and embodies the ways of the Pangcah people. He also recounts his frustrated attempts in defending traditional culture against Taiwan's encroaching modernity.

Gubuk (Hut) is an experimental project growing out of Indonesian migrant workers' personal experiences in Taiwan. Gathering in a staged hut built out of abandoned materials from a factory, the workers retell and re-enact their own stories under fabricated identities. In this space where fiction intersects with reality, they share tales of escape, of loss, and of suffering.

In ancient times, the vast area between the Vistula, the Volga, the Baltic Sea, and the Black Sea was called ‘Sarmatia’, where Moldova, Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine can be found today. Quoting the works of the Sarmatia-born German poet Johannes BOBROWSKI (1917–1965), KOEPP travels through the area, depicting the region as the ‘dreamland where all nations and religious [groups] would find their place if history had not ploughed it all up over and over again’.

This film depicts the fraught marriage between a Taiwanese man and his Vietnamese bride, taking us inside a household simmering with tension. Born out of a disabled man's wish to obey his mother and a woman's effort to help her family escape from poverty, the marriage has produced two daughters and a complicated family drama.

In the Tibetan village of Xiongtuo, Sichuan Province, China, resides the 'Boiling Water Lama'. Every day, countless people from the major Tibetan regions travel across mountains to visit him, seeking solutions for their own lives. When the water on the stove comes to a full rolling boil, the believers waiting outside the hut takes off their shirts one by one, ready to hear the lama's unique 'answer'.

Two teenage girls, both growing up in broken homes in rural Taiwan, lead their lives in completely different directions. Pei searches for hope in love, while Chen struggles to avoid her parents' fate. As they approach the age of 18, the undercurrents of their lives nearly overwhelm them. Spanning over seven years, this is a story about abandonment, courage, and growth. It raises a universal question: How can an unloved life find the strength of her own?

The year was 2011: In Wukan, a village in Guangdong, China, corrupted officials had illegally sold the villagers’ land, and the villagers decided to fight back. From the outset of the protest, first-time documentary filmmaker Jill LI embedded herself in the community of Wukan for several years. She chronicled the complex experiences of three key figures in the movement, examining an unprecedented experiment in grassroots democracy and its fallout.

In 2016, a group of performers from Clowns Without Borders, including the director’s own sister, traveled to the Greek island of Lesbos to bring laughter to the waves of refugees crossing the sea to escape from war. They were greeted instead with closed gates, witnessing firsthand the effects of the European Union's new refugee policies. The director joined them on their journey, which gradually became a reflection on the sisters’ own tale of displacement during the Lebanese Civil War.

KIM Ryun-hee, a North Korean housewife, was forced to come to South Korea and became its citizen against her will. She tried to smuggle herself out of the country, even sought political asylum at the Vietnamese Embassy, but all her efforts were in vain. As her seven years of struggle to return to her family in the North continues, political absurdity hinders her journey back to her loved ones.

For more than 40 years, PARK Insun, a former U.S. military's 'comfort woman', has lived in a shanty village adjacent to the American base soon to be demolished in Uijeongbu, South Korea. Mourning the silent death of a former colleague, she is spotted by ghostly messengers, who are fabricating life stories for the wandering spirits before taking them to the underworld. Refusing to be silenced and erased, Insun decides to defend her own true story against the messengers’ tampering attempts.

The director revisits places of his own past. Born in 1944 in Stettin (now the Polish city of Szczecin) and grown up in Berlin-Karlshorst, he has met and turned numerous people and locations between the two cities into the protagonists of his films. Now, he returns to them to find out more about the history of this region, and how much of his own life has overlapped with the lives of his protagonists.

Nine-year-old Ayana is determined to become the first girl player in the history of kok-boru, a traditional Central Asian horseback game of warriors. Despite obstacles along the way, support from her family helps Ayana to believe in herself and live her dream.

In 2009, the director enjoyed an unforgettable self-driving tour in northwest Guangdong, China. He revisited the same sites with his college roommate in 2016, meditating on the ideas of people, places, and serendipity. Narrated in colloquial Cantonese, this personal road film operates on a topography of memories, reconstructing and retelling the travellers' youth as well as the hidden histories of the Pearl River Delta region.

Laika, a stray dog, was the first living being sent into the outer space and a certain death. According to a legend, her ghost has returned to the Earth and roamed the streets of Moscow ever since. Interwoven with Soviet archive materials from the Space Race, this magical documentary is filmed at the eye level of a dog, following Laika's poignant trail and accompanying her spiritual descendants, a pack of street dogs, on their poetic yet brutal adventures in today's Moscow.

In 1999, the Indigenous Culture Club at the National Taiwan University held a series of annual ceremony activities as a tribute to traditional indigenous rituals. So unfamiliar with their native languages and cultures, however, the student organisers found themselves in an awkward position that brought them into conflict with the school administration. Where would they find the 'salt', an in-depth understanding of their cultural identities and backgrounds?

My sister Pei-ling went through with an unexpected pregnancy. The child was nicknamed Angoo. In three years, Pei-ling broke up with the child's father, met a new boyfriend, left Angoo in my parents’ care to move in with her boyfriend, until she finally moved back in with our family due to the disapproval of her boyfriend's brother. The parent-daughter relationship was strained at first, but gradually things changed; understanding and love returned between them.

A classic 1956 French documentary short, fully restored. Directed by Alain RESNAIS in collaboration with scriptwriter Jean CAYROL, a survivor of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp himself, the film features the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek established in occupied Poland, while describing the lives of prisoners in the camps. The title is taken from the Nacht und Nebel program of abductions and disappearances decreed by Nazi Germany.

A complex Okinawan road movie that mixes facts with fiction to tell the story of two men who cannot forget the wartime memories of their childhood. New HD digital and 8mm film footage is interspersed with older 8mm material shot by the director in the 1970s, creating a rich cinematic world for the story that flourishes into a radiant elegy of expressive gestures.

Born in Abkhazia, marionette artist Sipa LABAKHUA had to flee with his family to Moscow when the USSR collapsed. Years later, Sipa returned to his small and unrecognised birthplace, taking to the road with his autobiographical one-man marionette show, provoking audiences from different backgrounds with his own history of displacement and war. Combining elements from documentary, fiction and animation, this road film sheds a poetic light on the highly topical questions: What makes a country? What is home?

16-year-old Alessandro and Pietro live in the gang-ravaged Traiano region of Naples, where in 2014, a teenager Davide BIFOLCO was gunned down by a policeman. These two inseparable friends accept the director's proposal to film themselves with an iPhone, recording and commenting on their daily experiences, their own neighbourhood—now empty in the middle of summer – and the tragedy that ended Davide's life.

Visualising the visible/invisible boundaries of socio-spatial stratifications, the film presents urban space in Hong Kong as a vivid showcase of the hidden logics of today’s world cities. The film contains three chapters—global, local, and border spaces—to illustrate the tension among their visual existence, function and ownership, and how the city’s public space has been constructed, used, owned, and interpreted.

Song of the Wanderer features a group of 'voiceless people', a part of the indigenous community in which the filmmaker resides. Due to frustrations with work, divorce, and life in general, they are often subject to isolation, emotional breakdowns, and even self-harm behaviours. The filmmaker engages them in genuine conversations, while inviting the viewer to listen to these 'voiceless people' sing: In their songs are their true feelings.

In the 1990s, foreign migrant workers began to occupy the Taiwanese workforce under the government’s new policy. Many indigenous labourers lost their jobs and were forced to return to their homelands, squeezing out a living on odd jobs, frustrated and powerless. Please Give Us a Job records their unheard voices against a backdrop of economic growth, and observes the rivalry and tension between foreign workers and indigenous workers.

An indigenous couple married young with a child when they were only 16 and 19 years old. The financial burden and challenges in life were so heavy for them that quarrels were unavoidable. As their former elementary school teacher, the filmmaker recorded the young couple’s daily life, while trying to give them a hand in their time of need.

A busy nanny school in Indramayu, West Java, prepares women to work overseas in countries like Taiwan as domestic workers and caregivers. Every year, hundreds of women like Sukma, Meri, Muji, and Tari are recruited by local agents, who are then remunerated by the schools after successfully seeing their recruits enrolled. While the women bring income that can alleviate family poverty, are they really improving their lives? And at what cost?

A Fight to the Death traces the decades-long battle fought by the former residents of Baoshan Township in Hsinchu County, Taiwan. 36 years ago, due to the government's expropriation of lands to build the Baoshan Reservoir serving the Hsinchu Science Park, the villagers were forced to leave their homes. Paranoia and anxiety set the tone of this drawn-out battle against institutions, and the truth remains clouded.

Due to its proximity to the No. 6 Naphtha Cracker Complex, the Ciaotou Elementary School Syucuo Branch in Mailiao, Yunlin County, has relocated its students four times within three years for fear of health risks. It is said that Kisses and Hugs, a newspaper praising the benefits and prosperity brought by the petrochemical industry, is delivered monthly to local households. Through this publication, this film examines the complex relationship between the industry and the local community.

Travelling to the island of Usedom, the beaches of Poland, the Baltic coasts, and the northern archipelago of Sweden, the director shows the impressive natural landscapes and the different regions on the Baltic Sea as the home of a wide variety of people. The political conflicts between East and West, regional egoism, and ecological problems are also reflected in the history and the present of the sea.

This film is a visual record of long-lasting open wounds, and the disappearance of collective memory. The director examines the current plight of a group of elderly Chinese peasants, who, as civilians, have been made victims of the Imperial Japanese Army's lethal human experimentation in Northeast China, suffering from the festering wounds for over 70 years. The director also visits some surviving soldiers of Unit 731——Japan's notorious regiment devoted to biological warfare during World War II.

Jerry, a 73-year-old world traveller from Britain, has settled in a rural community in Linyuan, Kaohsiung fifteen years ago. He only speaks of his past, because he cannot see much future for himself. His present centres around feeding the twenty-plus stray cats in his neighbourhood. Although Jerry has no savings, sometimes needing help with buying food for his cats, he has found peace and serenity in his life in Taiwan.

This documentary tells two different stories featuring ventilator-dependent patients in Taiwan and the people around them. Along with nearly 4,000 such cases on our island, these bedridden and mostly unconscious individuals are unable to communicate with the outside world, except through their ECG waves. Facing the dilemma of futile medical care, and the rights to live and die as one chooses, everyone has to make their own decision: Should they stay on or move on?

After encountering a series of setbacks in life, the filmmaker returned to her hometown, Chuncheon, South Korea, a place she was once desperate to forget and leave behind. She visited her hard-working mother and sought to untangle their complex mother-daughter relationship, while recapturing their family portrait in vanishing memories and spaces.

Guillaume SUON's mother always refused to speak about her childhood during the Cambodian genocide. Seeking to understand her experiences, Guillaume and his brother began to film Antoine, a photographer and a grandson of Armenian genocide survivors, following him to the Middle East to photograph the ghosts of his ancestors. Antoine’s journey in turn paved the way for the brothers’ quest back to Cambodia—with their mother.   With support from  

Bleak yet ultimately beautiful, Scheme Birds is a coming-of-age documentary, bursting with the frustration of a generation of Scots let down by society's promises. We see the fading steel town, Motherwell, through the eyes of Gemma, a soon-to-be mother on the verge of adulthood. In a place where you 'either get knocked up or locked up', Gemma carves out brief moments of tenderness amidst the violence of her local housing estate.

This experimental documentary opens with a family anecdote: When coming across my grandmother’s painting in a random Chinese restaurant in the States, my aunt burst into tears. Using this anecdote as its axis, the film wanders through Cold War constructions, Taiwan–United States relations, generations of diaspora, family romances and ghost stories, while my family’s personal and collective memories are transformed into another tale of 'the Flying Dutchman', doomed to sail the oceans forevermore.

In the Dabao River basin, where the Llyong Topa indigenous community used to be, stands a 'ghost temple” where hundreds of Atayal people were buried. They fell victims to Japanese government's first wave of indigenous genocide during its colonial rule of Taiwan. The massacre occurred much earlier than the Wushe Incident (1930), yet still rarely known to the world. The filmmaker visited the mountains over a hundred times, seeking clues and traces to fill in the blanks of history.

Dear Photograph (Sashingwa) is an artistic elaboration on TAKAMINE Go’s first solo exhibition, featuring a series of hand-tinted photographs, some of which directly came from his family album. The director’s 8mm camera lingers over the family portraits, as if in imitation of a common experience: touching photos of personal significance by hand. These visual materials and subject matters will be constantly revisited in TAKAMINE’s later films.

With childhood friend OTA Kazuhito (Tarugani) as his sound man, TAKAMINE Go captures on 8mm film the everyday landscape of Okinawa right after the reversion to Japan, and the scent of death from his parents’ haunting memories of the Battle of Okinawa. Inspired by Jonas MEKAS’s Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972), the non-narrative form and intermittent slow motion make Okinawan Dream Show a visual poetry beyond a déjà vu.

Every morning, hundreds of cows are herded to a landfill site in Indonesia, relying on human food waste for sustenance. They eat, nap, play, mate, even spending the night here, while having to keep themselves safe from the excavators and bulldozers that plough around the site. No matter how different their life experiences are, all these rubbish-eating cows will share the same destiny under the butcher’s knife.

A lone stranger broadcasts fragments of life he has experienced from different time and space, hoping to make a connection and communicate with other beings of life. Like a time capsule, this film contains artefacts of the first Filipinos, a family, a political upheaval, and the existence / non-existence of God, in an interactive and very obtrusive form rarely seen in conventional Filipino documentaries. Scan the QR Codes before and after the film for more hidden messages!

In a Truku community in Hualien, students of a local elementary school were rehearsing for the upcoming sports day. The most challenging show––the 'Hunting Dance'––fell on the shoulders of grade one and grade two students. The ancient tunes and dance moves were passed down from elderly women of the community. Filmmaker and school teacher YANG Ming-hui (Umin Howa) captured the practices along with his regrets at how many of the Truku traditions were being forgotten.

Mabanan is an Atayal settlement in Miaoli County, where the filmmaker was born. During the Japanese colonial rule, most of the indigenous community’s land was expropriated and registered as state-owned forest. The Kuomintang (KMT) government later imposed even more restrictions on the use of the land. How would the Mabanan community reclaim their homeland when the government still refused to recognise proofs of residence of their ancestors?

In the Atayal mythology, the souls of the deceased arrive in Heaven by way of the rainbow, yet only the ones who have the traditional face tattoo would be welcomed by the Ancestral Spirits. Seeing the decline of this Atayal tradition, the filmmaker interviews tattooed tribal elders, capturing their longing for lost family, friends and homelands, as well as their feelings about their impending return to the rainbow.

According to the Tao people’s traditional beliefs, illness was a sign of supernatural possession by evil spirits. Many patients thus became isolated, unable to receive any medical care. A native of the Orchid Island (Lanyu) where she worked as a nurse, the filmmaker initiated a program in 1997, recruiting some 40 volunteers to visit and care for homebound elderly patients against considerable social pressure. This documentary captures the powerful dilemma when traditional values clash with compassion.

Ada was 19. A man she knew invited her to dinner and she accepted. Everything went wrong so quickly before she could even think to defend herself. With her body and mind in tatters, Ada returned twice to confront the perpetrator. Intertwined with other people's experiences, different yet at the same time so chillingly similar, Ada's story, as written by her own hand, is not only a personal catastrophe, but part of a wide-ranging social violence.

Recorded during fall 2008 inside a basement ‘mosque’ in downtown Manhattan. This film endeavours to re-examine the relation between time and space, a subtle investigation of the ordinary spaces that transform and transition between the playful and the sacred.

Ceuta’s Gate is a series of reconstructions and theatrical re-enactment, within a studio set, of the diverse situations in Ceuta, an autonomous Spanish enclave in the north of Morocco, opposite Spain. This space is the stage of cross-border exchanges of all kinds, observed from various perspectives.

In this century-spanning family saga, Janna Ji WONDERS embarks on a voyage of discovery. She takes us from the family cafe at the Lake Walchen (Walchensee) in the Bavarian Alps, to San Francisco in 1967, where the infamous 'Summer of Love' took place. Tracking down each link in the chain, this documentary is a timeless family story about women from three generations and their search for identity, their self-realisation, love, loss, birth, and death.

The first episode of Fragrant Formosa takes viewers through one of the most famous annual religious events in Taiwan. Believers used to spend eight days accompanying the sea goddess Mazu from Dajia (of Taichung City) to Beigang (of Yunlin County) on foot, before escorting her back to Dajia with rituals and celebrations. In this digitally restored version, the film is reunited with its original audio track in Taiwanese, which was banned on release due to the KMT government's Mandarin policy.

A train rolled into Tamsui, a charming harbour town full of historical and cultural complexity. European-style architecture tells its colonial past, while Fujianese immigrants' influence stays present in local people's everyday life. Celebrated photographer and cinematographer CHANG Chao-tang captured Tamsui in the 1970s on film, creating a nostalgic yet melancholic concerto played by missionaries, fishermen, and tourists.

The riverbanks are dotted with food stalls and buzzing with the parasol-holding crowd. Everyone is here to watch the exciting dragon boat race. Voice-over narration in melodic Taiwanese describes pre-festival preparation, and the celebrations and rituals in various parts of Taiwan. Through carefully-crafted script and well-executed camerawork, this documentary gives a vibrant portrait of ordinary people’s lives in a festive atmosphere.

I grew up in an ashram, a spiritual hermitage in India, of which I had to keep silent. I was taught to dedicate my life to the Guru, so I could understand the 'truth' of life and become enlightened. About 20 years and a lot of therapy later, I set out on a journey to understand the secret I was forced to keep and to answer the questions I had throughout my life: Was I raised in a cult? What happened to the other ashram children?

Two teenage girls, both growing up in broken homes in rural Taiwan, lead their lives in completely different directions. Pei searches for hope in love, while Chen struggles to avoid her parents' fate. As they approach the age of 18, the undercurrents of their lives nearly overwhelm them. Spanning over seven years, this is a story about abandonment, courage, and growth. It raises a universal question: How can an unloved life find the strength of her own?

This film centres around three condemned prisoners who have committed different crimes: One is still serving his sentence; another has taken his own life while imprisoned; the last one has already been executed. Using news footage and unembellished interviews, the director shows his concern for the prisoners and their families as fellow human beings, examines the contemporary history of death penalty in Taiwan, and further questions the current judicial system.

In the Tibetan village of Xiongtuo, Sichuan Province, China, resides the 'Boiling Water Lama'. Every day, countless people from the major Tibetan regions travel across mountains to visit him, seeking solutions for their own lives. When the water on the stove comes to a full rolling boil, the believers waiting outside the hut takes off their shirts one by one, ready to hear the lama's unique 'answer'.

This film depicts the fraught marriage between a Taiwanese man and his Vietnamese bride, taking us inside a household simmering with tension. Born out of a disabled man's wish to obey his mother and a woman's effort to help her family escape from poverty, the marriage has produced two daughters and a complicated family drama.

This film revisits locations where crimes or accidents have taken place, to find out if these places can transcend time to engender their own significance. With the barest of details gleaned from contemporaneous news clippings, the filmmaker reconstructs the incidents via a dry voice-over. The film is narrated by LIM Kay-tong, the presenter for a Singaporean true crime series, Crime Watch.

Shot inside Cinema Salam and in the surroundings of Agadir, Morocco, the film revisits the destructive 1960 Agadir earthquake through archives, seismic data, and a local poem interpreted by singer Ali Faiq. Geological anxieties surface in the dinosaur footprints on a nearby beach, echoing the strange coincidence that the film screened in the cinema on the night of the earthquake was Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956), a famous figure of post-apocalyptic days.

Despite several requests from survivors, there is no memorial for the killed victims at Omarska concentration camp near Prijedor, Bosnia–Herzegovina, and the site of the camp is now a steel manufacturing factory. Once in a year, the premises are open to public for the commemoration. The film intends to construct a memorial in 3D animation from the archive images, videos, recent photographs, guided by the testimonies of the survivors of the camp.

For more than 40 years, PARK Insun, a former U.S. military's 'comfort woman', has lived in a shanty village adjacent to the American base soon to be demolished in Uijeongbu, South Korea. Mourning the silent death of a former colleague, she is spotted by ghostly messengers, who are fabricating life stories for the wandering spirits before taking them to the underworld. Refusing to be silenced and erased, Insun decides to defend her own true story against the messengers’ tampering attempts.

With 35mm still photographs obsessively tape-spliced together, one frame at a time, E-ticket is a frantic re-cataloguing and re-editing of a personal archive for the rebirth of forgotten images. Scenes shift from a school trip to India, to a violent 2005 protest at a World Trade Organisation summit in Hong Kong. A retelling of Dante's Inferno for the streaming age.

Two decades after the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997, the files concerning the Sino-British negotiations are finally declassified, revealing key information never known to Hongkongers. This film centres around four women volunteering for Decoding Hong Kong’s History, a project digitising records of the Handover from the British National Archives, and the women’s thoughts on identity, diaspora, and their home in troubled times.

West Estate spotlights the severe housing problems in Hong Kong, taking the spirit of resistance outside of the protest. The damaged walls in the cage-like tenements reflect the many forms of social injustice as well as Hongkongers’ widespread sense of rootlessness. Connecting three stories from different households like puzzle pieces, the film depicts people’s despair over issues of family, sexuality, love, and freedom.

This Anti-ELAB (Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill) Movement documentary short takes us back to the airport occupation on 12 August 2019. Although this new form of protest soon turned into a crisis, it became an important lesson for the protesters. Compared to the tension inside the airport terminal, the long walk home at sunset on the Lantau highway, which connects the Hong Kong International Airport to the residential areas, felt like a reminiscence of a school field trip.

What were you doing, when I took this photo as the train was passing by your house last year?' Carrying pictures taken from the train a year ago, the director returns to the same sites, asking this question of those who appear in the images. More often than not, people do not remember. Many things have changed in a year, but those fleeting moments and bygone memories are captured on film, sealed forever.

On a rainy afternoon, the filmmaker set out from a hospital and followed an elderly window screen repairman to Toad Hill, an old settlement on the outskirts of Taipei, helping him to find a woman from his past. On the dreamlike journey, the repairman discovered his long-forgotten and decayed memories of this metropoli

Under the regime of constant discipline and incorporation, rituals, faiths, bodies, and the relations between men and gods are all being uprooted. When time is dissected into infinitesimal parts in the gaze of a stopped frame, those links abandoned in the furious chase emerge again. Men and gods, destruction and rebirth, all gather here in search of a safe corner.

Seven-year-old Zakhar lives on the vast Siberian tundra in the Arctic, hundreds of miles away from other human settlements. One day, his nomad family is joined by a teacher, sent by the authorities to explain to Zakhar and his brother Prokopy why they need mathematics and PUTIN. The teacher is supposed to give them a standard set of knowledge, but Zakhar's inquiring mind craves answers to millions of questions about the world.

After restoring their Ceremony of Ancestral Spirits, the Atayal people of the Raisinay Village, Miaoli County, were distressed by the absence of their traditional garments. Yuma Taru, a researcher of Atayal folk costume, decided to trace back their history by conducting interviews with the elders, learning weaving techniques from them. This documentary captures the passing down of the weaving art, and the younger generation’s yearnings for revival of their traditional clothes.

ZHENG Jin-sheng of the Fata'an community , Hualien, lost his right hand and left leg in a childhood accident. A man with a positive attitude to life, he worked in carpentry, caught pond loaches, and enjoyed dancing with his people. Most impressive of all, he trained hard to become a wall-painting expert, leading a life devoted to his work.

A group of Pangcah people left their homeland in the eastern Taiwan to seek jobs on the western coast. They drifted from one construction site to another, until they finally settled on a temporarily unclaimed clearing behind a university, building a community far away from home. Despite the instability of work and earnings, they lived life to the fullest catching fish, growing vegetables, singing and dancing, even electing leaders of their community in this 'new paradise'.

For over 50 years, a civil war has been waged between the Shan people, the largest ethnic minority group in Burma, and the Burmese military. Jai Sang Lod, a young stateless Shan man living in the disputed borderlands between Burma and Northern Thailand, reluctantly submits himself to become a soldier for the Shan State Army. Trained to fight for Shan sovereignty as a lifetime duty, he yearns for a piece of identification and a steady living.

A collage of scenes in the periphery of film sets and locations in Manila made to look like a fictional piece, a gift to a baby named Aki Tala who will grow and watch her father's work for the first time.

People Power Bombshell: The Diary of Vietnam Rose is a behind-the-scenes account of The Diary of Vietnam Rose, a film left unfinished by the late Filipino master director Celso Advento CASTILLO. On the basis of 20 recovered rolls of never-before-seen footage of the film shot at the time of the People Power Revolution of 1986, director John TORRES interviewed the original cast and crew on their distressing experiences on the island during the film’s production, including the possible harassment endured by the then 19-year-old actress, Liz ALINDOGAN. Mixing found footage with newly shot scenes and sound snippets extracted from the cast interviews, this documentary is an imaginative homage to a lost classic and the seductive power of filmmaking.

A contemporary adaptation of a popular play in the Uchinaa Shibai (Okinawan theatre), this film features a blue-collar factory worker who transforms into Untamagiru, a local Robin Hood figure, on the eve of Okinawa's reversion to Japan. Considered TAKAMINE Go's representative work, Untamagiru presents a balanced critique through a light-hearted folktale that situates the Okinawan conundrum in between class struggles and colonial exploitation.

In 1972, astronaut Charles DUKE landed on the Moon on the Apollo 16 mission, in charge of taking photos of the lunar surface with a high-resolution camera. From the exploration of space to cyberspace, from an analogue Moon in 1972 to a virtual Moon in Google Earth today, this film is a meditation on the human perspective on Earth and the constant struggle with our temporal and spatial limitations; a story about parallel universes where eternity seems to be lost between frames and interfaces.

'Mama has two phone numbers. We do not talk about immigration on her “Obama phone”. For that we use the other number with no data plan', says the narrator as he crosses the United States by train. From Los Angeles to New York, multiple voices share thoughts, dreams and histories that evoke images far away from the enclosed interior of the train, creating a site of precarious movement, migration, and fugitivism.

Song of the Wanderer features a group of 'voiceless people', a part of the indigenous community in which the filmmaker resides. Due to frustrations with work, divorce, and life in general, they are often subject to isolation, emotional breakdowns, and even self-harm behaviours. The filmmaker engages them in genuine conversations, while inviting the viewer to listen to these 'voiceless people' sing: In their songs are their true feelings.

In the 1990s, foreign migrant workers began to occupy the Taiwanese workforce under the government’s new policy. Many indigenous labourers lost their jobs and were forced to return to their homelands, squeezing out a living on odd jobs, frustrated and powerless. Please Give Us a Job records their unheard voices against a backdrop of economic growth, and observes the rivalry and tension between foreign workers and indigenous workers.

An indigenous couple married young with a child when they were only 16 and 19 years old. The financial burden and challenges in life were so heavy for them that quarrels were unavoidable. As their former elementary school teacher, the filmmaker recorded the young couple’s daily life, while trying to give them a hand in their time of need.

An old man trudges along the mountain path with heavy burden on his back. He walks through day and night, and through the change of seasons, until he reaches home to rest.

After his creative partner committed suicide a year ago, Gunmaker-Baoqiang, a Chinese indie rock singer throws his whole being into touring. At home, he worries about the education and future of his son; on the tour, he howls for freedom in an authoritarian state rife with communist ideologies—all the while under surveillance by the authorities. In a restricting and suffocating world, where can an idealist call his home?

When Taipei is still quiet and asleep, trucks after trucks emerge in the dark with fresh fruits and vegetables, seafood and meat. Intermediate wholesalers' auction chants rise and fall; the Central Market is getting ready to feed the city's population. The film offers a glimpse into the lively hustle and bustle of the Market in the 1970s, but was likely banned from broadcast due to its perceived display of the unhygienic conditions.

Zhonggang, a former commercial harbour in Miaoli County once suffering from sedimentation and decline, thrived again with its joss paper (ghost money) industry. Almost every family was part of it: Different generations worked together, attaching gold foils and stamping the paper in red ink, before sending it to dry. When massive stacks of golden joss paper basked in the sun, the town seemed to be covered in dreamy golden waves.

Situated in the hills leading down to the coast, Ruifang used to pride itself on its coal mining industry. Every morning, miners from surrounding neighbourhoods gathered here to put on their gears and got into the minecarts, heading underground into pitch darkness. They worked non-stop in challenging conditions of high stress and high temperature, providing Taiwan with an indispensable source of energy. This documentary celebrates the miners’ contribution, but also stirred up controversy due to its inaccurate report of their wages.

Spring, 1989: For exactly 100 years, the brick-making industry has determined the rhythms of life in Zehdenick, a small town north of Berlin in the state of Brandenburg. Veteran and young brickmakers speak openly and critically about their working and living conditions. As the first instalment of Volker KOEPP's March Brandenburg trilogy, this film was premiered in October 1989, one month before the fall of the Berlin Wall, at the Mannheim Film Festival in West Germany.

The second instalment of March Brandenburg trilogy captures the conversations taking place in Zehdenick during the weeks leading up to the first free elections in spring 1990. Including previously censored footage of March Brandenburg Bricks, this film reflects the hopes and concerns of the business community, working class women, and young people during 'Die Wende', the period of political change in East Germany.

The final instalment of March Brandenburg trilogy moves away from the town of Zehdenick in order to focus on the rural areas north of Berlin. Made in the period between the currency union in East Germany and the official reunification in October 1990, the film shows how drastically the lives of the residents have changed, as crippling unemployment has taken the place of hard work.

On 9 May every year, people gather in Treptower Park in Berlin. They come dressed in their best outfits or in Soviet military uniforms, carrying flags, banners, and posters. They lay flowers at the monument to the Soviet soldier, singing, dancing, and drinking to celebrate the victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany. The film is a direct reportage from Treptower Park, 72 years after the victory.

Chernivtsi, a city in western Ukraine (Czernowitz in German) used to be the centre of the Jewish culture, but only a handful of its Jewish residents survived the concentration camps—Mr ZWILLING, the self-proclaimed pessimist, was one of them. Everyday, Mr ZWILLING visits the elderly Mrs ZUCKERMANN to speak German, to talk about Judaism and their city, and to reminisce about the war.

Mr. LIN is a happily retired man who spends his time keeping company with his toddling grandson, walking his dog, and playing golf with his in-laws. Recently, he has been obsessed with houses with river views. In LIN's city of demolitions and reconstructions, money-making investors buy and sell houses at unaffordable prices. Above the skyline of Taipei, will the boundaries between daydreams and reality ever blur?

Immobile in a forever-outdated house, where the sands of time fall to the rhythm of rural Azerbaijani sounds, a mother waits for her son. When he arrives, their conversations circle around existential questions and news from afar, troubling and cryptic. Unrest cloaks the world outside. Mother and son grow closer, and renewed life springs between them.

A storm was brewing in the early hours of 1 July 2019—the 22nd anniversary of the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong. Facing the absurdity of the Hong Kong Government's indoor flag-raising ceremony, protesters questioned the effectiveness of peaceful protest. They stormed the Legislative Council Complex as a last-ditch effort to ignite change in the Anti-ELAB Movement. Violent street clashes with the police continued deep into the night.

A loose collection of scenes in Hong Kong shot over a five-year period, this film begins with the Umbrella Movement in 2014 and ends right before the summer of 2019, when large-scale social unrest and violent resistance erupted. The everyday scenes capture the ambience and the landscape of change in the city, standing as a quiet prelude to the ensuing conflicts.

Through processing a year of bewildering news and images from my home in Hong Kong, I've come to question the significance of dear memories and personal joy in the face of things falling apart. As the days teeter toward an uncertain future, Happy Valley cinematically probes the role of the so-called ‘little things’. A rendering of the perseverance of spirit in Hong Kong - an attempt at irony that can’t help but be emotional.

The Anti-ELAB Movement came to a horrifying peak in mid-November at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. When protesters blocking the Cross-Harbour Tunnel retreated to the University, the police surrounded the area and put the school in a lockdown. Anxious citizens made various rescue attempts, but could barely go near the campus. Meanwhile, within those red brick walls, the camera captured the trapped protesters’ desperation and determination.

The filmmaker reduces 4K video footage of various cities and common objects to the finest grains, and then layers these abstract images to create a visually evocative contemplation of human existence. The title of the film, an original phrase meaning 'remember the stars' and 'remember we live among the stars', invites the viewer to transcend the earthly boundaries that are tearing us apart.

In the 1920s, a Kavalan family took refuge in Hualien. 70 years later, the filmmaker, a third-generation member of the family, embarked on a self-searching journey to recover his lost identity, producing the first documentary ever made by a Pingpu descendant. Through depiction of traditional Kavalan ceremonies and collective memories, the film asks us to recognise Pingpu peoples’ place in Taiwanese history, as well as their suffering and feelings of inferiority during years of forced migration.

The film follows the story of A Mu Yi, who grew up in an indigenous community in Tai'an Township, Miaoli. She was arranged by her parents to marry a man twenty years older when she was just fourteen. For years, she suffered from domestic violence and alcohol addiction, eventually fleeing back to her hometown. Armoured with her faith, A Mu Yi rediscovered her inner strength to walk out of the darkness and began to help more indigenous women falling to similar fates.

In 1999, the Indigenous Culture Club at the National Taiwan University held a series of annual ceremony activities as a tribute to traditional indigenous rituals. So unfamiliar with their native languages and cultures, however, the student organisers found themselves in an awkward position that brought them into conflict with the school administration. Where would they find the 'salt', an in-depth understanding of their cultural identities and backgrounds?

My sister Pei-ling went through with an unexpected pregnancy. The child was nicknamed Angoo. In three years, Pei-ling broke up with the child's father, met a new boyfriend, left Angoo in my parents’ care to move in with her boyfriend, until she finally moved back in with our family due to the disapproval of her boyfriend's brother. The parent-daughter relationship was strained at first, but gradually things changed; understanding and love returned between them.

'A toy-like image of a sailboat sails without interruption on the water, to the sound of roaring waves, which seems to underline the image to the point of exaggeration. . . . The same sense of humour, tenderness and feeling for the more humble details of life . . . are given further dimensions in her films.' – Robert COWAN, Take One

'A cat eats its methodical way through a polymorphous fish. The projector devours the ribbon of film at the same rate, methodically... The fish in WIELAND's film, and the miraculous flesh of the film itself, are reconstructed on the rewinds to be devoured again.' – Hollis FRAMPTON

'After long suffering under the cats, the rats break out of prison and escape to Canada. There they take up organic gardening, with no DDT in the grass. It is a parable, a satire, an adventure movie . . . one of the most original films made recently.' – Jonas MEKAS

Combining political awareness, a unique aesthetics, and a sense of humour, Solidarity is a film on the strike at the Dare Cookie factory in the early 1970s, with an organiser's speech on the labour situation serving as the soundtrack. Hundreds of feet and legs are seen marching and picketing, with the word 'solidarity' superimposed on the screen.

'The film was made in 1967. You find out, if you don't already know, how naming tints pure vision.' – Michael SNOW 'The repeated images are such that they appear to be different each time; to be expanding. 1933 has a machine-mechanical doll rhythmic-like structure.' – Robert COWAN, Take One

'I can imagine only St. Francis looking at a water plate and water dripping so lovingly, so respectfully, so serenely. [WIELAND's then-husband Michael] SNOW and WIELAND's film uplifts the object, and leaves the viewer with a finer attitude toward the world around [them].' – Jonas MEKAS, New York Times, 1969

'A film made from outtakes from a Job Corps documentary which features hand-tinted sections… full of small movements and actions, gestures begun and never completed. Repeated images, sometimes in colour, sometimes not. A beautifully realised type of chamber-music film whose sum-total feeling is ritualistic.' – Robert COWAN, Take One

'I decided to make a film at my kitchen table, there is nothing like knowing my table. The high art of the housewife. You take prisms, glass, lights and myself to it. "The Housewife is High". Water Sark is a film sculpture, being made while you wait.' – Joyce WIELAND

Blurring the line between reality and fantasy, TAKAMINE’s signature style of storytelling has already taken shape in this feature film debut. Set in Okinawa on the eve of reversion and filmed almost entirely in the endangered Okinawan language, the story revolves around a man who has quit his job at a U.S. military base and an ethnographer (acted by renowned Japanese musician HOSONO Haruomi) who attempts to marry a village woman in the traditional Ryukyu customs.