Director | Beatrice LEONG
Beatrice, an autistic filmmaker and activist, turns the camera around to reveal a lifetime of misdiagnoses and psychiatric institutionalization. She challenges the misconceptions and discrimination against girls like her.
Director, Producer | Ivonne Kani (Vonny Kanisius)
Conflicted between her own principles and her Chinese-Indonesian family ideals, a daughter filmmaker embarks on her kind of “Journey to the West” to answer the
question that linger inside her.
Director | Yih Wen Chen
Producer | Yih Wen Chen、Mandy Marahimin
Director | Paul CHU
Producer | Charlie CHEN
A 72-year-old artist goes against his family’s wishes, trains to fight in an amateur MMA match to explore the fundamental philosophies to his creative drive.
Director | ZU Guang-ning, XU Wei
Producer | LI Da-xing
Shanghai socialite ZHANG Sha engaged in post-war charity work in Syria but was faced with various kinds of pressures. How will she balance her personal value realization and social responsibilities?
Director | ZHENG Qing-yue
Producer | YAO Lu
In 1983, to become a woman, Zhang Kesha secretly underwent the first gender reassignment surgery in mainland China. After a lifetime of wandering, she yearns to be truly seen.
Director | Frank W. CHEN
Producer | Hui-chieh Danielle YEN
The historic and unparalleled rise, fall and epic comeback of global golf icon Yani Tseng who returns to the golf course, facing twists and challenges, and embarks on a quest to explore her life's purpose in 2024.
Director | LIU Shu-bo
The migration of people, sadness and joy, and the change of generations are just a fleeting dream of the land.
Director | YUAN Nan-xi
Producer | DENG Zhi-ying
A confused documentary filmmaker meets and follows a deaf girl, after 5 years, a friendship is forged. The story of the girl's reinvention of herself, after unearthing the causes behind extreme sports.
Director | Frankie SIN
Producer | HUANG Hui-chen, Peter YAM
Forty-eight years ago, my grandfather, a fisherman, brought my father to settle on Cheung Chau. But for our family, once nomadic fishermen, is this island really our home?
Director | CHEN Yi
Producer | SHAO Wen-jing
No matter how far the distance, AI brings everything within reach, documenting the digital return of cultural relics lost overseas.
Director | LI Shi-yu
Producer | Madi JU
With the ups and downs of grassroots star Pang Mailang in media development, the film discusses how people are stigmatized by onlookers and how to re-establish relationship in media changes.
Director | Eugenia LIU
Producer | ZHANG Bo-fan
A single mom decided to design a perfect baby with the help of modern technology. However, Ye has never thought about what it might cost to create a new life.
Director | SUN Yang
Producer | XU Xiao-fei
60000 miles is the total length of all blood vessels in the human body.
In a small town next to Beijing, exists a largest private hematology hospital in China, founded by Lu Daopei, the first doctor in Asia to complete bone marrow transplantation surgery. In his later years, he brought his son, who was doing art in the US, back to his home country in an attempt to help him take care of the hospital. After 38 years of separation from his father, his son Lu Wenzhao also wanted to prove himself in front of his father.
Dr. Yue Guanlan, the attending physician, has always aspired to be a doctor and save lives since childhood. Apart from hospitals, she has no life of her own. Her mother got breast cancer recently, she had to choose between the patients and her mother. The curse that doctors could not cure themselves tortured her.
The Ark House is a small house built by missionary Father Lin to help patients for free. They want to lead their patients to receive God's help in times of despair. Patients pretend to believe in God and slowly turn this place into a home in order to receive free help. They pray and leave after healing.
Director | ZHANG Nan
Producer | QI Yu
Given a choice between the presidency and the container ship, an African Muslim in China throws coins at his untold God.
Director | CHIU Ming-yuan
Producer | LIAU Jen-hui
The resentment results in reunions while the affection leads to separations.
Director, Producer | CHEN Teng
XIN Ying, the principal dancer at Martha Graham Dance Company, leaves the spotlight at the peak of her career and embarks on a journey to become a mother.
Director | LEE Kang-ling, HSU Huai-min
Producer | Lynn CHEN, Joseph LEE
Is it human desire that hijacks divine power, or does divine power give rise to human desire? This film explores the symbiotic relationship between spirit mediums and temples, questioning whether it is merely a simple matter of faith, or if faith engenders more dependencies and demands.
Director | YANG Nan, HE Pei-yun
Producer | TSE Shu-hao
Hovering over different cities, friendship is Su's only anchor, appearing by chance yet destined to dissolve; self-awareness grows on the assembly line, youth approaching its end. Is it his fate to repeat parents' life?
Director | CHEN Kuan-chun
Producer | Rooney CHANG
The story of three transgender men who risked everything to become their ideal selves, experiencing rebirth through adversity. Their lives are extraordinary because they have lived through two genders.
Director │ Kim WEBBY
Producer │ Alex LEE
In this hybrid docu-drama, fictional 26-year-old An JOE, makes a documentary about her ancestor, the real-life JOE Kum Yung.
JOE was 68 and crippled, a luckless Chinese goldminer, shot dead by a white supremacist, in Wellington, New Zealand in 1905.
Eurasian and adopted, An has just found her Chinese birth mother and is learning about being Chinese. When she makes a documentary about JOE’s murder, An grapples with her own half white, half Chinese identity as she confronts the present and past white supremacy that killed JOE. And the systemic anti -Asian sentiment in New Zealand at the time, reinforced by laws and policies.
As An investigates JOE’s life and death, the edges blur between past and present, until finally An and JOE meet face to face in the Chinese gold mining settlement where he lived and worked for 33 years, in New Zealand’s South Island.
Director │ Jian FAN
Producer │ Vincent DU
YU Xiu-hua is one of the most famous contemporary female poets in China. In 2015, her bold poem about desire, Travelling Halfway Across China to Sleep with You, became popular nationwide. Since then, several of her works have been bestsellers, with sales reaching 1.5 million copies, and she has millions of fans on Chinese social media. At the same time, she is also disabled, suffering from cerebral palsy. After becoming famous, she divorced her husband, whom her parents had arranged for her, and was not happy in the marriage. In 2022, at age 46, YU Xiu- hua finally experienced love for the first time with a fan who was 14 years younger than her. She threw herself into the relationship but unexpectedly suffered from domestic violence, which sparked intense discussion in China.
Director │ XIAO Yu-ru
Producer │ WONG Kei Yiu Kathy
In an old community in Neihu District in Taipei, there is an underground dwelling in an apartment building where twelve elderly people live alone.
Devout Mrs. ZHANG has started learning to write in order to read the Bible better. The Sergeant, who struggles with alcoholism, still insists on working at the park six days a week. Ms. LAI, with a youthful spirit, serves as the energetic errand-runner and food delivery person for the basement residents.Despite battling cancer, Captain KE still seeks joy in the karaoke lounge, singing loudly. Mr. PENG enthusiastically studies lottery numbers every morning.
During the earlier stages of their lives, they went through many ups and downs. Therefore, calm and autonomous life in their elderly years became their aspiration. Despite grappling with illness, poverty, and solitude, they continue to make an effort to age gracefully in this bustling metropolis in their own way.
Director, Producer │ WANG Jiu-liang
Seasonal fishing bans in China’s coastal waters allow immature fish and shrimps to grow temporarily. However, the relentless fishing season reopens before they reach maturity, and larger and larger fishing vessels with smaller and smaller nets are used to exploit fish populations as much as possible. The already extremely unbalanced ecosystem in China’s coastal waters is once again on the brink of collapse. The deep sea also once again becomes as deadly quiet as the dry desert.
Director, Producer │ WONG Ka-ki, HO Yuk-fai
Dad: Perhaps by the time you’re no longer a Hong-Konger, you lost your Hong Kong identity.
Hoi-nam: I still have it, I don’t have a UK ID.
Dad: By that time, you’ll have your UK ID.
Hoi-nam: So do I have to throw my Hong Kong ID away?
Dad: Maybe...
In 2021, Hoi-nam, a 6-year-old girl, and her 3-year-old brother Ah-yat moved to England with her parents to start a new life.
Facing questions about their identity and hometown, navigating the subtle changes in their sibling relationship, and dealing with the complex mix of love and conflict with their parents – this film will explore life topics such as identity, family, love, education, and career, thus taking us on an unpredictable journey of growth.
Director │ JIANG Xuan-nian
Producer │ JI Hang
The lesbian couple, both Hang and Nian plans to become mothers next year, this plan drives from Hang’s promise to her parents: she must give her parents a grandchild before she turning into 35. However homosexual marriage is not admitted in China, unmarried women are not allowed to purchase sperm or receive assisted reproductive technology in public hospitals. The couple decided to travel to Cambodia for IVF, and “customizing” a baby.
This is a story about love, responsibility and identity, and tells in the first-person. “I” as main character, “I” as Hang, also “I” as Nian. Writing all the compromises and difficulties that LGBTQ+ groups have to face for establish a family through self-gazing.
Director │ HAN Meng
Producer │ Vincent DU
Shiju village is located in the northwest of China, one of the poorest areas in China, backed by mountains, far from the sea, and 1400 kilometers away from Beijing. China’s most successful entrepreneur, PAN Shiyi, was born in a poor family here. He is the boss of SOHO China, once China’s largest real estate company, with assets of 1.3 billion USD and top-grade office buildings in prime locations in Beijing and Shanghai. Many internationally renowned designers, such as Zaha Hadid, have designed his real estate projects, winning numerous international awards. In early 2019, PAN Shiyi built the “Virtue” kindergarten in Shiju village and planted 40,000 rose bushes. PAN Shiyi hopes to promote children’s education on virtues such as “love,” “honesty,” and “peace” from an early age.
Can this education on virtues be successful?
This film records the innocent understanding of the children in the kindergarten about truth, goodness, and beauty, as well as the real-life difficulties faced by women who are seeking love, faith, and money.
The 40,000 rose bushes in Shiju village, northwest China, experience the four seasons, blooming and falling, and they have a more complex meaning in the hearts of PAN Shiyi and the villagers, as well as in this documentary film. The women and children in the village are also rebuilding themselves and exploring the true meaning of “virtue” in the flow of time, from spring to winter, from blooming to falling.
Director │ CHEN Dong-nan
Producer │ Kay XU, ZHAO Jia
Whispers in May takes us on a poignant journey alongside 14-year-old Qinghua, whose first menstruation sets in motion a quest for self-discovery. In Yi ethnic traditions of Liangshan, this milestone demands a new skirt for the girl’s menarche ceremony, which signifies not only her transition into adulthood but also the looming possibility of an arranged marriage soon to come. However, with her parents working in far away cities and the recent loss of her beloved grandfather, Qinghua finds herself “homeless” and conceals her menstruation as a secret, relying on her two besties for support in finding the skirt.
As a hybrid documentary, the film embraces spontaneity as the filmmaker and subjects embark on an improvisational road trip, merging reality and imagination to explore the complexities of adolescence, cultural traditions, and the indomitable spirit of friendship as Qinghua bids farewell to her girlhood.
Director │ SU Yi-hui
Producer │ WANG I-chan
Darasong, a Rukai’s tribeperson, tirelessly gathers stones to construct a traditional slate house. However, the construction of a slate house is not considered within the regulations of modern society. Elders praise it, peers revere it from afar. And the authorities demand compliance whilst the tourists ask if they could have a stone to keep for themselves.
The slate house is yet to be completed before Darasong’s father passes away. He aspires to surpass his father and finish building the slate house so that he could become the man of the tribe. Before he began the construction, he dreamed the house was slanted. Will Darasong complete the slate house? After it is completed, will it remain solely his? What does their desired house look like?
Director │ Chris WU
Producer │ Beverly HSU
“Special Companionship in Long-Term Care”
WU Hsin-fei once said, “I don’t think I was taking care of my mother; in contrast, it is my mother who kept me company and fulfilled my wishes to take care of someone.”
Apart from the general perspectives of Long-Term Care, the story of companionship and caregiving purely focuses on the genuine interaction between mother and daughter, and the portrayal of the characteristics which transcends the human family bond, as we can see by the character of care-giver, WU Hsin-fei. The documentary took almost 6 years for filming.
Director, Producer │ YANG Fan
Over the past few decades, China’s economy has experienced rapid development, leading to significant changes in its social structure. The eight children of Chunyu (the director’s grandmother) have also been swept into different social classes by this wave, acquiring distinct social identities.
Due to Chunyu’s illness, they are forced to return to the impoverished mountain village where they were born. During the lengthy process of waiting for Chunyu’s passing, they not only experience the fracture of social classes within the family but also find themselves tightly bound together by blood ties.
From the director’s personal perspective, this film documents the complex emotional journeys of the family members and the history of a village on the path to extinction.
Director │ LIANG Chou-wa
Producer │ Andy HUANG
Replica is a feature-length documentary following the love stories of four young Chinese women from different backgrounds and ages who are in love with AI Chatbots. These chatbots can provide 24/7 companionship, write touching poetry in a second, and will never say goodbye to them...
Director │ HSU Ming-chun
Producer │ Diana Chiawen LEE
At the end of World War II, instead of repatriation, Taiwanese soldiers who fought for Japan were sent to Siberian POW camps by the Soviets. Memories Frozen in Time aims to uncover the experiences of these Taiwanese Japanese soldiers in the POW camps and their lives upon returning to post-war Japan and Taiwan.
At 96, Masao Go, the sole surviving Taiwanese Soviet POW camp survivor, struggles to memorialize his legacy as he grapples with his identity.
With faded pictures, handwritten diaries, muffled tape recordings, and scattered records, Eiko longs to piece together her late father’s life, HSU Ming-hsin, who was thrust into a war that forever changed his life and future generations.
Curious as to why CHEN Yi-wen watched sumo matches, listened to Okinawa radio programs, and sang Japanese military songs led Lihang to discover his grandfather’s painful past.
Their stories intertwine, weaving a tapestry of shared but forgotten memories.
Director, Producer │ Claire SHIH
Director, Cinematographer │ Ray CHAN
Here, you can see a group of pigeons carrying wooden whistles and moving forward with a burden, flying over one yellow dry field after another. We thought that all pigeons wanted to return home, but some pigeons from the beginning flew in the opposite direction and disappeared without a trace. An elderly farmer hoped that his friends and relatives would return home safely and orderly, just like the pigeons he raised. Unfortunately, his wishes were not fulfilled. He saw solar panels growing on long- abandoned fields one day, friends’ homes turning into foreclosed properties, and the village withering away like drought-stricken crops. The elderly farmer, who had played with the Pigeon Whistles all his life, wished to continue his unchanged lifestyle. However, his family had different ideas, leading to a clash of generations. Faced with this conflict, what should the old farmer do?
Director │ JU An-qi
Village is the third part in the China Architectural Heritage Trilogy series and the world’s first documentary on the revitalization of China’s rural architectural heritage.
This documentary will cover 25 provinces across China and visit nearly a hundred historical and cultural towns. Through artistic imagery, it will record this architectural heritage in its past and present states. Interviews will be conducted with dozens of architects, experts, scholars and practitioners of architectural revitalization. The objective is to present the changes in rural heritage and explore ways to protect and utilize architectural heritage in the process of urban-rural renewal and sustainable development in China. From a documentary, social and academic perspective, it will fill the visual gaps in the history of Chinese architecture and cultural heritage.
The proposed documentary Village focuses on several highly representative rural areas, delving into topics such as the balance between nature conservation and economic development, rural life and cultural enhancement, and architectural aesthetics and contemporary applications. The goal is to visually narrate several moving stories concerning rural architecture and individuals through images that are both humanistic and thought-provoking.
Director, Producer │ GUO Si-yuan
The main storyline of this film follows two protagonists who have experienced dramatic changes in their lives along with the city. One is a young girl who looks back at her hometown, and the other is an old revolutionary who has been continuously documenting the historical changes in Tangshan. They represent the “past” and the “future” respectively. There are also ordinary people in Tangshan who have experienced the earthquake in various industries. The film explores the impact of the earthquake on their lives.Trauma is a common human experience. Everyone has moments when they need spiritual reconstruction, and everyone can draw strength from the stories of the resilient and optimistic people of Tangshan.
This is a documentary about urban memory and the rebirth of a city after a disaster. It takes the perspective of a young girl to look back at her hometown and contemplate homesickness. It reflects on disasters, life, and death. It explores how to face and remember history and continue to live well after a major turning point in the era.
Director │ YAN Hao-hao
Producer │ Guo Guo
Following our 18 aunties, in their seventies, through their daily practice, we dive into the pain and growth and their unique personalities driven by the need of being seen on a bigger stage. Our film will peek into each individuals’ personal and social lives as an immigrant, as a senior member of the society, as a woman, and as a dancer with passion. As objective spectators, we will dive deeply into why this group of dancers NEED to dance, HAVE to dance and the price of dancing, sometimes even, at the expense of their own health and mental stress. Our story will further investigate how an Asian female immigrant living status was affected by the society and shaped by their personal experiences, and what the American Dream means to them. By following their journey toward competing on the biggest American mainstream stage – America’s Got Talent, we want to discuss the modern mantality of face aging problems, why it is important for this specific group of immigrants to be seen and what it means to themselves if they succeed.
Director │ WANG An-min
Producer │ CHOU Chieh-hsuan
ZHAO Guo-gong, known as A-Gong, is a legendary figure in Taiwan’s mountaineering community. Speaking Taiwanese mandarin, he captivates with his strong presence. This film not only showcases the daily work of Taiwan’s high-altitude collaborators but also delves into how A-Gong has dedicated a significant portion of his life to the mountains. Behind his seemingly carefree exterior lies a deeper exploration of his personal journey and how he confronts the challenges of life. Despite his advancing age and the storms he has weathered, why does he find himself drawn back to the mountains? While mountains serve as a place of healing and fitness for most climbers, are they A-Gong’s sanctuary in life or a choice born out of necessity?
Director │WONG Ka-wai, CHUNG Hiu-fung
Producer │ CHUNG Hiu-fung
Goodbye Aberdeen documents three hawkers’ family stories before and during the reconstruction of Aberdeen Market.
Fung had never felt the market familiar, even though his parents have been working there for nearly 40 years. Hoi-tong met Pun at Hee Kee, her mother’s vegetable store, yet the couple rarely has enjoyed a romantic time. Indeed, subaltern love stories are full of tensions: debts and favour, freedom and responsibility.
Shing ( 勝 ) literally means “victory” in Chinese. Yet Shing Kee never hardly feels victory for his entire life. In the 1980s, Shing Kee was reluctantly “left” from the foreign-funded company and took over his father’s coffee store. Over thirty years he has witnessed ridicule and hypocrisy without any nostalgia for this market.
Wing-hang finally chose to accompany his mother to keep his father’s dried seafood shop. However, in 2021, the young man bids farewell to this city, searching for his new life in London.
To stay? To close? To move away? Three trajectories. Two generations of business heirs. This documentary delineates how life trajectories intersect with the city’s socio-historical transition.
Director, Producer │QI Ji
Dog King, a famous figure in Binhai New District, Tianjin, a man living on the edges of social orders in terms of gender, age, class and urbanism. He’s known as a millionaire and an “urban nomad”. The way he reacted when his black dog was killed in a drunk driving accident, and when the scrap he stored was forcefully cleaned out by the government and his community, embodied his unique attitude towards life.
Heated discussions over the Dog King’s story took place during the shooting and making of the film. While looking at his inability to voice and his disordered sanity, we saw not only ripples from China’s tide of urbanization, but also reflections of ourselves.
Director │ZHANG Hong-jie
Producer │TING Chung-ying
YANG Wei-cheng is one of the few cetacean veterinarians in Taiwan. He studies the pathology and acoustics of dolphins for years, attempting to use data and evidence to give a voice to the dolphins.
Taiwan will install more than 500 offshore wind turbines by 2030, but the scheduled wind farms are located close to the habitat of Chinese white dolphins, and the piling noise can still be heard clearly within the protected area. How the noise will affect the dolphins is unknown. In order to take the animal right into account and find ways of peaceful coexistence in the development process, studies are conducted to investigate the sensitivity of dolphins to sound, to explore the safety range value, and to promote the change of policy and regulation.
Director │Cicy LIN
Producer │Estelle LI
Three of eight global bird migratory routes pass by China. Birds in China are suffering from not only habitat loss but also poaching. Although the Chinese government banned the poaching and selling of the bird in 1997, illicit trading has been rampant. Overall, 146 bird species (10.6% of the birds of China) were threatened.
Nesting, laying eggs, and migrating are important moments for migrant birds.
We will follow the story of three bird protectors dedicated to protecting the birds in these important moments.
Ranger FU Jianguo, spends 300 days of the year patrolling in the field for the birds.
Rescue station holder TIAN Zhiwei, works as a bird babysitter in Bohai Bay, the main stopover of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway.
Animal rights activist LIU Yidan, follows birds’ migratory steps and fights against the poachers.
Will the survival birds finally arrive at their wintering destination in southern China?
Director │PAN Zhi-qi
Producer │ZHAO Jia
Beekeeping is an ancient and traditional profession in China. Each spring, beekeepers would constantly be on the move with their bees depending on the temperature and seasonal changes in hopes of catching quality honey to harvest in order to get a good financial return. But this traditional industry is facing many challenges due to climate change and factors such as the technological and capitalisation of agriculture. In a road movie format, the film follows young beekeeper LONG and his family as they walk through China chasing flowers for honey, witnessing the survival of beekeepers in the context of the ecological crisis.
Director │XUE Xue, Tarik NÚÑEZ
Director, Producer│ Tarik NÚÑEZ
The Chinese diaspora is the most extensive among the world’s migrant populations. Recent estimates put the number of Chinese emigrants at 40 million people. Far from being a homogenous group, members of the Chinese diaspora have diverse economic, cultural, social, educational, and personal backgrounds as well as very different life stories and emigration experiences. Despite the growing interest and the constant immigration of Chinese to the Americas through the 20th century, there is very little information about their migration to Ecuador. This Documentary explores the topic from a historical point of view to fill this void. Come closer to the newer generations of Chinese that have been raised and born in Ecuador and the adaptation process to the double nationality and intercultural values that define this new person. The multiplicity of identities among this group where one can find many interesting stories.
Director │CHEN De-ming
Producer │GUO Mou-xiang
Always
People say “always” never came back. I say “always”,
Stay in the wind.
Is “always” the present or the past?
GONG You-bin, a young boy left behind who lost his mother when he was a child, wrote this verse in his diary.
The leaves are carved, everything grows, and life starts over and over again. What can be left behind, what can be remembered. Poetry is like a transparent and fragile glass bottle, leaving traces in time.
Director │FAN Ruo-zhou
Producer │CHEN Dai-shan
After 8 years of silence, 27-year-old Liu Li finally gathers the courage to sue her father for sexual abuse. Shockingly, after her father is detained, she starts to receive blame and humiliation from her relatives. Her mother’s reaction is also disappointing. Family members’ attitudes open up a door to the patriarchal morality that tends to blame women victims. With the support of her boyfriend and her lawyer, she keeps fighting back for her justice. Surprisingly, on the trial day, her father suddenly withdraws his confessions. Will Liu finally win her justice and find true relief?
Director, Producer │HSIEH Sheng-hung
97-year-old KANG Chen-kuo was born in North China. Having spent his youth in the wartime China, he was forced to fight in the Korean War. He ended up being caught by the US military as a POW and sent to Taiwan. Deep in the mountains in Taiwan, KANG met the daughter of a Taiwanese indigenous tribal chief and got married. Since then, KANG has settled down in the tribal village and run a grocery store with his wife.
In this grocery store, which opens seven days a week, we hear both Mandarin spoken with a Northern Chinese accent and Paiwan, a Taiwanese indigenous tribal language. What do his children and grandchildren, who are proud to be born into a Taiwanese indigenous tribal chief’s family, think of KANG who comes from China? Here we witness the legacy of the geopolitics in East Asia and a reflection upon the history of modern Taiwan.
Director │YANG Juan
Producer │ZHANG Xin-wei
The “Tiantian Guesthouse” is a guesthouse next to the temporary labor market, the guests are temporary workers and the lowest accommodation price is only 10 yuan. Some people stay for one night and leave, others stay for a few months or even a year or two. Some of them are just for food and clothing, some for freedom, and some are forced to come here. The guesthouse operator , “Mang Mei”, is sometimes the boss, sometimes the foreman, and sometimes a temporary worker. The multiple identities also make the multiple relationships between Mang Mei and the guests, because of this relationship, there are many people coming and going in this guest house, all kinds of people, and there are many stories.
Director │Dicky HUANG
Producer │ Penny WU
The main theme of this project is to investigate and document the purchase situation between the jobbers and farmers, issues inside and outside the “Xiluo Fruit and Vegetable Market”. In the process of filming, it was slowly discovered that the problems led to an unsound situation, namely the “production and marketing structure,” which involves the pathology of agriculture in Taiwan. We hope that this is a documentary film on agriculture that can provide food for thought.
Director, Producer │Guligo JIA
Heart to Heart is a film about family trauma and reconciliation. The film tells the story of a young Ukrainian man whose family is twice split up by the turbulence of Eastern Europe. Both coming from a broken family, we form resonance by resonate via letters and making films.
After a series of struggles, I decide to point my camera at my family’s trauma; Mark decides to break through obstacles to reunite with his families and to start a new life.
Director │Cecilia KUO
Producer │XIE Yi-chun
A Reunion records the director’s own family, who migrated from Taiwan to Brazil 30 years ago and then from Brazil to Tianjin for 20 years. Along the way, they faced the hardships of survival, the pain of separation, and the longing for their hometown. Even though they went their separate ways, they still love each other in their way in life. Under the epidemic, family members in various places are facing a fork in the road of life choices... What has the migration experience brought to them, and how will the choices they make affect the fate of the next generation? When will the next family reunion be? How will it happen?
Director │CHIU Chi-liang
Producer │LI Jing-ru
The Bunun people call their traditional area, Jiaming Lake, the Mirror of the Moon. An elder laments that it is no longer the Bunun who climbs to Jiaming Lake, but the swarms of hikers. Because of their familiarity with the mountain environment, the Bunun were employed as porters as early as the Qing Dynasty. During the Japanese governed period, they were even relied upon as porters and guides for mountain forest surveys. Today, many Bunun people still work as porters, engaging in manual transportation. But there is still no sound labor system with the succession of the times, and many injured porters were eventually forgotten by the market.
The two brothers of the CHIU have suffered so much that they founded their own porter company. They always keep their optimistic. They will take their eldest brother’s most beloved son to Jiaming Lake, hoping to see the future in the Mirror of the Moon that their nephew would become a porter.
Director │XU Chu-yun
Producer │XU Wan-tao
This lady walking in the street of Shanghai-well-educated,elegant and sophisticated.
She was labeled...that’s not polite put a label on a woman! Unless it came from the doctor-she is a cancer patient.
She always seems to be in the limelight. Wearing her favorite lipcolor-505 matte,she is fierce and invincible.
Before the diagnosis, she graduated from the Law School of Fudan University with a master’s degree,experienced in four top law firms,and finally switched her career to the financial industry.
After being diagnosed with cancer, she began to share her treatment experience and her own mentality, which helped her gain a group of fans, and also received a lot of negative comments for having no “illness stigma” in sharing her personal treatment and “hunting for attention”.
She is an independent woman full of self affirmation. She is also a’slasher who is having multipleoles such as “medical influencer” entrepreneur and cancer fighter fighter Having the circumstances of a cancer patient has led her to the second adventure in life.
Director │XU Wei-chao
Producer │ZHANG Yi-qian
In an era of skyrocketing housing prices, the Chinese government has committed itself to providing everyone with a home and launched reforms that prioritize building social housing. Baiwan homes is the crown jewel of this grand scheme. It is designed by world-renowned architect MA Yan-song, built in 2020, and currently houses 2,600 low-income households.
For MA Yan-song, Baiwan Homes is a test of his ideals for low- income residents. For the government, Baiwan Homes is a manifestation of the superiority of socialism. Though they pay well below market rate for rent and have no property rights, the residents strive to be the real masters of the community. Our film follows the interplay between these groups of people to see how the residents’ desire to define their own community, the officials’ instinct to stay in control, and MA’s ideals, interact and wrestle with each other.
Director, Producer │HO Chao-ti
The view point of camera is Hypnos, which has curious and caring character and is close to people’s lives.
In a trance before falling asleep, people carry out various activities. In the private sleeping space, Hypnos wanders here, watching his or her activities, feeling what he or she feels, and listening to the whispers in people's hearts.
The inner world presents an honest look, despairing and hopeless, uplifting and carefree, or making a wish for oneself gently.
Some people fall asleep during the day, while others at night. Hypnos sneaks into people's dreams with a magical space where is not known to be reality or fiction.
It is a documentary with essay film style. It hopes to bring the audiences into a sound sleep in a sleepless era.
Director, Producer │ Tracy DONG
The documentary is about five single men living in China’s big cities. They are a single dad back from New York after divorce, a Chinese medical doctor who has separated with his girlfiend due to the high demand of Lucky money when preparing for wedding, a gum private trainer who came from rural area pursuing true love and a senior manager in an IT company who doesn’t want serious relationship.
They belong to different social classes with various identities, facing the same emtional difficulty.
How the men face difficulties and challenges in the urbanized, internet and feminist society?
Director │Lucy HUANG
Producer │ZHANG Yue
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2021, the world is quickly shifting from traditional, brick-and-mortar businesses to electronic commerce. And the once-prosperous Hanzheng Street, Wuhan is facing an unprecedented economic downturn.
The 68-year-old Big Eyes Missy uses live streaming to garner a group of loyal fans during the pandemic and becomes a fashion icon in Hanzheng Street. Her worsening health condition reminds her that it is time for her to step down, but as she feels responsible for her business company, she couldn’t call it quits.
Born in the 70s, President Peng decides to establish a new local brand in the neighborhood. She wishes to transform the clothing industry’s negative perception of the Wuhan Market but must battle her self-doubt as she encounters the difficulties of entrepreneurship.
Born in 1989, Qin wants to expand the production of her factory this winter and lead the business to a higher level. However, she struggles to balance the need of her 7-year-old daughter for companionship with the increasing pressure of running her factory.
The story follows the lives and journeys of these three women and how they struggle and thrive in their dilemmas.
Director, Producer │Laha Mebow
Zu-jun is living at the tribe with altitude of 1200-meter, where people mainly grow cabbages, a typical TAYAL tribe of mountains. He’s quite thin and small among the same age but inside he has an old indigenous spirit. He never leaves the tribe and has been living in the TAYAL culture. His sound family is rare at the tribe and parents are diligent for economic stability. Zu-jun is feeling lost about leaving the tribe for high school.
Zi-ning’s tribe is bedside the sea, the same one with the director. She got no parents, growing up in the charity, was brought to the tribe by his uncle after junior high school. She hopes she could act like indigenous. She uses unisex appearance to cover up her sensitive heart.
Director │ Louis HOTHOTHOT
Producer │ ZHAO Jia
1.83M tall, weighing 200 kgs, Laurel BURNS moved from the US to Beijing to pursue her dream of becoming an actress.
As the pandemic aggravated, Beijing was put under lockdown, and Laurel in turn lost any opportunity to work or to perform. Her life hit the bottom overnight, and loneliness started eating away at her.
Laurel started to indulge in gluttony and sex. She ate all sorts of things, dated with various people; no matter they were married, had a foot fetish, or if it was a toy boy, a cynical Uyghur young man, or a civil servant that desired to migrate to another country...they offered each other brief solace, then went their separate ways as day dawned.
The pandemic ends, and the world will not be the same as before. How will Laurel’s dream evolve?
Director │YE Bing-jun, Summer YANG
Producer │ Summer YANG
When Adi was four, his mother ran away because she was abused. Adi’s father has been working on temp jobs in the city. For years, Adi has been lacking parental care.
He is eager to find the sparkles in his lonely world. Adi loves his scooter. The biker friends and scooters keep him company instead of his family. Adi is too young to explain why he likes to dress in women’s clothing. But, the happiness feels so real for him whenever he dresses up and gets more attention. He is rather be despised by others than being forgotten.
The reality and poverty force Adi to seek survival in big cities. Meanwhile, Adi’s long-lost mother reached out and wants to reunite with him. Adi reevaluates his life and wants to make peace with himself before making the decision...
Director │Nina XIE
Producer │XIAO Long
88-year old Grandpa ZU lives a simple, idyllic life by the river with his cattle. The oldest one has been with ZU for 16 years. ZU cherishes the aged cow as it brought tranquility to his life since it was purchased and helped him send her granddaughter into college. But filial piety swings ZU’s granddaughter and daughter to another direction – they wanted ZU to quit herding and selling the old cow while they make ends meet by working in a city. Grandpa ZU continuously puts off this offer, knowing that this old buddy gets to live as long as he herds her by the river day after day. As the intergenerational tension builds, a dramatic turn of events arrives with a earthmoving truck at the river...
Director │GU Xue
Producer │SHEN Jian-hang
GAN Hua-ge, an educator that had obtained his Ph.D. from Tsinghua University, has been engaged in education for more than 20 years.
He believes that education can break the boundaries between discipline and age. and that the basic education from elementary to high school can be completed in five to six years.
LEE Jing-jing, who comes from a multi-child family in rural Hunan to Beijing to look for work; WANG Xiao-chun whose mother gave birth to her when she was still unmarried; WANG Tian-yu, whose father was handicapped from a car accident and whose mother left shortly after he was born. The three of them came to Beijing and were under the care of GAN Hua-ge, the educator.
The three children find that the new way of education is different from the traditional method. Even though they try to adapt but still feel a lot of pressure. At the same time, Mr. GAN also discovers the various problems that had formed in their upbringing...
Director │HONG Yi-lin
Producer │ GUO Xiao-dong
The story takes place in the countryside of Fujian Province, In the nineties in the context of family planning, influenced by a preference for sons over daughters, WU Yachun and his wife wanted to have a son but they couldn’t afford to pay the fine, so he sent his two daughters away. After 30 years, the eldest daughter who WU Yachun sent off, returned to the native family with her daughter after divorce. WU Yachun is under pressure from society and family for sending her daughter away. The documentary tells the story of the violent enforcement of the one-child policy. There were induced labor babies who cried when they were induced, The history of blood and tears, the village hundred years of trees to witness everything.
Director │HSIAO Chu-chen
Producer │Ben CHEN
Fifty years has passed since the genesis of the first Intel microchip in 1971. Ever since that, the said technology has been developing at a rapid pace. Microchips became the backbone of modern society. The technology’s influence even extends to national defense and aerospace engineering. Taiwan supplies more than 65% of the global contracted chips. The island’s industrial transformation started in 1971. Now nearly 50 years later, the semiconductor supply chain may be playing an intricate role in the island’s geopolitical status.
Director │TAN Mo
Producer │ LI Shan-shan
After staying in Poland for seven years, Mo will spend her first Chinese New Year at home. At the age of 30s, she’s still single. The traditional Chinese physiognomy believes female with mole under eyes will bring bad luck to their husband. Her mother is worried and implores her to remove the mole under her eyes. Her grandpa pays a visit, but in fact to urge her to get married. Under intense pressure, Mo is assailed by self-doubt. So, she decides to hold the camera and explore the reasons why she has stayed single for many years; Falling in love with a younger man is supposed to bring some hope to her life, but after a short period of happiness, the fact broke Mo’s love dream. When the warning bells start ringing, the unexpected breast cancer sparks a deep self-examination to Mo.
Director │ZHAO Qian
Producer │Alice YOU
Executive Producer │ Patrick Mao HUANG
In a small village, Wuzhuang, Dongyang has been suffering from schizophrenia for years. The only family he had was his sick and old mother. Their family and relatives abandoned them and moved away.
Dongyang was convinced that he is a famous music producer, but his mother could not care less. As Dongyang’s condition worsen, his mother hads to hide outside all day long to avoid being beaten by her son during his mental breakdowns. Eventually, she was killed by her son during another horrifying mental breakdown of his. After killing his mother, Dongyang was sent to a local mental institute to receive treatment.
After his slow recovery, Dongyang has returned to Wuzhuang to live but this time all by himself. Where will life take him from here...
Director │Jean-Robert THOMANN
Producer │Garance HUANG
ZHANG Meng-yi is a 47 year-old Taiwanese opera actress who, in 2018, suddenly faced a big turning point: she was appointed leader of Taiwanese opera troupe Hsintrun by national star LIAO Qiongzhi. Actress, teacher, troupe leader, the film reveals the various faces of ZHANG Meng-yi who sees the pressure mounting in his daily life. On stage, she often sings and cries. On the daily life, concentration in work, joys and sorrows draw the portrait of this actress who opens for us the doors to her world, that of Taiwanese opera.
Director │Tina XU
Producer │ZHANG Xin-wei
After Sam’s village burned to the ground by the Taliban, he and his family fled for Iran, becoming refugees. At the age of 13, he takes the 120 dollars he’s saved from working in a fruit warehouse to travel westward through eight countries. All along the way, he runs from bullets, hides into shipping containers, and swims to the Greek shore after his boat has capsized in the middle of the night.
Sam arrives in London, and many years later, we meet and fell in love. However, Sam can’t escape the shadow of memory and the faces of those he met along the way. Ten years later, we decide to embark once more to retrace his path through Europe together, in order to face old ghosts and find new courage for the future.
Director │SUN Guo-hu
Producer │SHI Xiao-an
The adolescent sisters CHEN Zixin and CHEN Kexin are twins who have been studying Yue opera since they were little. Their parents wanted to send them to a professional troupe in order to give them a more systematic education in Yue opera. For that purpose, they put in a lot of effort.
Growth Hormone
Height is the first threshold to become a Yue Opera actor. In order to overcome their genetic limitation, their parents chose to inject them with growth hormone. It might seem inhumane, but it has long been a common practice among the candidates. The shot is the substance that helps them grow quickly as much as the cardiac stimulant that helps parents to realize their own ideals.
Contracts and Diplomas
Zhejiang Xiaobaihua Yue Opera Troupe is the best Yue Opera troupe in China. It is also the only way to become a top Yue Opera actor. However, if one chooses to enter Xiaobaihua, one is required to sign a 15-year contract with the troupe and accept the terms such as they are only allowed to have a secondary school education. The parents weighed their options and eventually reluctantly signed the agreement. A year after entering the troupe, it was faced with a system reform. The allure of traditional opera is gradually fading, and there’s very little future aspect to it.
Competition and Chances
Upon entering the youth training program, even though the students appear to be on the same starting line, but their family backgrounds and social connections do have an influenced on their development. The sisters discussed their respective competitors, as classmates, parents, teachers, and the troupe compete for the few spots in the spotlight. Their professional ability is no longer the only variable that affects the result. As their roles in the troupe change, the sisters also begin to develop different personalities, and their views on the world and the future also begin to change...
Director │ Elvis A-Liang LU
Producer │Stefano CENTINI, Emma LEE
The story revolves around a group in an indigenous Paiwan community called A-DJU, which literally means sisters but has come to designate instead cross and trans-gender men, recently becoming a well-known word in the indigenous societies.
Gender issues have long been a taboo in indigenous communities, but in 2018, when same-sex marriage was allowed in Taiwan, traditional societies have been swept with misunderstandings and discriminations. The film focuses on a group of A-DJU who decided to put up a music festival dedicated to this culture, and use it to confront and change the traditional values of their community. Can their courage inspire and unite their tribes again?
Director │ WONG Siu-pong
Producer │ CHAN Tsz-ki
How would life be if it ended in your youthful twenties? Ceci set forth on the journey to Germany for a drug test to fight against a rare and incurable disease with a group of patients from Hong Kong. They pinned their hopes on “ONC 201”, a drug which has not been accepted by the Hong Kong system. At the final stage of her life, Ceci rebuilds her distant relationship with her mother, and responds to her birth, her growth and the ultimate denial as the truth of life and death unfolds.
If life is destined to be miserable, why do we have to be born and exist?
Director │ Jenn LEE Yuen-ching
Producer │ Joanna WANG
There used to be bristled with statues of political leaders in Taiwan, which is rarely seen in the world. Following the political change after 1990, the statues had been removed one after another. Unlike other countries, where statues no longer worshipped had got destroyed, there are nearly three hundred abandoned statues in Taiwan kept in the park in a small town. They are not appealing anymore, whether made by some famous artist or just cheap replicas. Comparing with those more than 700 statues of CHIANG Kai-shek, however, they have escaped the issue about retention/abolition, and seem to be content to hold a small corner. Relying on people’s thoughts and curiosity about the history of the nation as well as personal memory, they have become an uncanny post-modern landscape of their own.
Director │ FAN Li-xin
Producer │ XU Qiu-li
ZHANG Hong is an eternal hassler who comes from a poor family and lost his sight when he was only 21-year-old. While his wife aspires to a peaceful life, ZHANG Hong keeps trying to be successful in order to prove himself and to bring a better life for his family.
Now he works as a blind masseur in Tibet, a typical work for a disabled person in China, but the 45-year-old family man want to try something not so typical: climbing Mount Everest. By preparing this journey for the past five years he hopes to finally turn his luck around. Physical challenges, lack of financial support, and concerns from family and friends are all dilemmas on the road to his dream.
In March 2021, ZHANG Hong finally made the trip and set out for Nepal, embarking on the journey to realize his dream. But what awaits him on the Himalayas was bad weather, danger than ever ice falls, and a worsening conflict with his only Chinese guide. Will he summit and turn his fate into luck?
Director │ SU Qing
Producer │ CHEN Mina, GUO Xiao-dong
Shanghai Music Academy is a world top level university and one of the best in China, and is so-called the “cradle of musicians”. For the blind girl WANG Yi-wen, to succeed the entrance exam of the academy and to be enrolled in the opera singing department will be her first step to become a top-class singer.
“If we cannot make it, we are going to plant date trees in Xinjiang”, WANG Yi-wen and her mother comfort themselves with an imaginary gardening life far away from their hometown Henan province... Shanghai Music Academy is known for highly rigorous admission rules. WANG Yi-wen and her mother, they are confident in Yi-wen’s music and performance level, but are stuck by the regulation of normal eye-sight level against blind persons. Can they finally make a step forward?
Director │ XU Wei-chao, CHEN Wei-xi
Producer │ Andersen XIA
SHENG-wei has been drifting down the streets in Shanghai, making a living by scavenging. A vlogger uploaded a footage of him sitting on the side of the street, reading and talking about The Zuo Tradition to the internet, putting him under the cyber spotlight instantaneously. “Masters drift, and clowns claim the thrones.” The netizens started fabricating legends about him, forging their own respective masters from their own respective point of view, treating him as a rhetorical allegory of the time. The online celebrities, like leeches drawn to the taste of blood, all try to get something out of his short-fleeting glory. Since then, his life track took a drastic turn, same as 26 years ago when he was diagnosed with a mental illness. When fate propelled him to return to the society, how would he come face to face to the crime and punishment in his previous sufferings? When each and every fans are on high hopes of him creating a brand new world on streaming platforms, only SHENG himself appeared disengaged and hesitant. He knew that all this was not what he really wanted. As the cameras close in on him, will he be able to escape Truman’s lot, and live a new life that he really desires?
Director │ ZHOU Ming-ying
Producer │ ZHAO Jia
The film would be a social commentary on child models. By understanding both the parents and the children’s motivation and reasoning, we can better understand the ins and outs of this business. Moreover, the film takes a deep look at the growth and education of these young models. The documentary focuses on participants from all income levels, and present the similarities and differences of the models and their family, in hope of reflecting the social values and patters of participants of this business.
Director │ LIN Shih-chun
Producer │CHEN Yu-lin
Negative retouching––a traditional photo manipulation skill before photography evolved into the digital realm, have been keeping uncountably beautiful precious images and memories for generations, now a dying craft.
LIN Lien is a skillful negative retoucher. She grew up in her family-owned photography studio where she learned and inherited her father’s retouching skill, afterward it’s been a great part for her own life, so to those photo studios from all over Taiwan who lean on her.
It is a flashback about her career life becoming a living witness of the rise and fall of the film photography business in Taiwan.
Director │ ZHOU Tia-nyi
Producer │ ZHANG Xin-jie
Chengyu ZHOU and Yezhen XIONG have been married for almost 70 years. Because of personal clashes, they’ve been quarreling with each other through whole life. But together they made it in those tough years of China and have established the most well- respected family in the village. Days pass by peacefully as they’ve still lived in the countryside away from their kids.
Chengyu’s 90th birthday is coming. He has expected it for a long time since everyone in the village will see the prosperity of ZHOU’s family. However, Yezhen doesn’t think the way. After seeing many ups and downs, she fears the fortune of the family will end someday.
The sudden death of their daughter-in-law, along with other family issues, made Yezhen fall apart. She gets terribly sick, and sometimes paranoid. Chengyu, the only one she can rely on, start to look after her from day to night. They even quarrel more as they’ve never been such close, but gradually they try to understand each other.
In the changing of seasons, this two old people are looking back on the past decades and looking forward to the most big day so far in their twilight years.
Director, Producer │ LAI Kuan-yuan
Producer │Carol HAN, TUNG Meng-jen
Thinking generated from listening and speaking is a process of linguistics. This film is about making the audience feel and summon the existence of the Sirayan language, and allow the audience to experience its thought process and usage. Such experience not only encourages them to think critically about the Sirayan language, but also conveys the film concept to the public, allowing them to understand the main purpose of the film, which emphasizes the importance of being “willing to use the Sirayan language” in the process of language revitalization.
Director | LIU Xiang-chen
Producer| XU Qiu-li
Renowned visual anthropologist LIU Xiang-chen returned to the Pamir plateau with his daughter, LIU Bei-bei, in order to fulfill a promise with the Tajik old father Wuzuer Niyazi. Following the ancient Tajik tradition of “seeing the mountain as seeing the father”, the group decided to visit the highest mountain in the Pamirs––K2. Having filmed in the Pamir Plateau for two decades, LIU Xiang-chen has a distant relationship with his daughter. The film is observed from the perspective of the daughter, whose attitude also experienced from unwilling to join, complaining and difficult coping, to finally understand the cause of his father’s love of life, and the depth of a father’s love. Completed the reconciliation of the father-daughter relationship.
Director, Producer │ David FRAZIER
Producer │ Eli KAO
During the 1980s, Taiwan’s final decade under martial law, rock bands of international students suddenly found themselves releasing Mandarin pop albums and performing on the nation’s highest rated TV programs. This is the story of two bands, the Typhoons and the Diplomats, the first “foreigners” to release Mandarin records and their unlikely meteoric careers in a madcap economy of rampant piracy and fly-by-night record companies. Their legacy includes Taiwan’s first rock stars and one of the longest running pub bands in Asia. The film also tells the history of a Taiwanese society opening its doors to the world and its ears to rock ‘n roll, starting with the US military clubs of the 1960s, when Taipei was “the sex capital of Asia”, and exploding with the economic boom of the 80s, when dancing was illegal and the party never stopped.
Director │ KANG Yu-qi
Producer │CAO Xi, Dana KALMEY
Inspirare takes us into the life and underwater world of female freediving champion, Jessea Lu, as she journeys into the abyssal depths to complete a feat never achieved before––diving to 100 meters with just one single breath in the 2021 world competition. After suffering a dangerous underwater blackout during last year’s competition, Jessea comes back with renewed ferocity and a bigger, more dangerous goal. Will she reemerge from the depths this time around?
Director, Producer │ Luka Yuanyuan YANG
Producer │ DING Da-wei, ZOU Ai-yang
In 2018, the mainland Chinese director Luka Yuanyuan YANG set out on a journey in search of forgotten Chinese women. Following the trails of Esther ENG, an early Hollywood pioneer now in obscurity, she arrived in San Francisco Chinatown and met Coby YEE, a legendary nightclub dancer, Cynthia YEE, founder of “Grant Avenue Follies” and the ladies of the dance troupe. Despite different circumstances of life, they found each other through dancing in their twilight years. The story gradually unfolds like a road film as the director guided the group for a tour from San Francisco to Havana, Las Vegas, Hawaii, Shanghai and Beijing. A contemporary reflection of Esther ENG’s now-lost 1939 film It’s a Women’s World, the trip became a bridge across geographic borders, a memory lane down the history of Chinese American audiovisual culture, where two once isolated worlds finally meet.
Director │ Stephen CHE, XIA Peng-cheng
Producer │ Vincent DU
Born in a farming village in Hubei, China, Brother Nut spent all his might and got into University. After he got his degree, he became an office worker in a big city, which was once his life’s trajectory; however, he had deviated from that path and became a down-and-out and yet renowned contemporary artist. His topics range from the spiritual predicaments that humans are faced with, to the relations between people and the environment. Time and time again, he creates one after another work that shakes the Chinese society and public opinions. How does he approach social issues through art? In the face of obstacles posed by the society and the pressure from his family, how will he manage to continue his life as an artist? This film will be a documentation of his development.
Director, Producer │ LIAO Jian-hua
YU Hao-wi, once a trouble-maker and a dropout student, is now an unconventional theatre teacher. Even though he has an intimidating demeanor, his character is in actuality warm and tender. He came to a halfway school that forbids the use of cell phone or internet, and enforces a community life, in the hope of helping the teenagers that are pulsing with the anxiety of youth to find a different outlet through theatre and their graduation project.
However, Diao-feng, one of the students, chooses to leave school to settle his gambling debt right before he graduates. He is, however, arrested before he manages to pay it off. One of the students, Jin-guang, on the other hand, keeps expecting his family to come and take him home, but unable to think of what it means to go home. He is dangling between expectation and loss. Life is like a play, YU can only offer his companionship as the students face one after another incidents.
Director │YU Zi-hao
Producer │ SHI Xiao-an
My father, Ming, is indebted for more than three million dollars from gambling, borrowing from loan sharks and cashing out from credit cards, and is unable to clear his debt. My mother, Feng, has no alternative but to help pay back the debt due to the then Chinese marriage law. When they resort to sell off the house in order to pay the debt, the tenant upstairs died of an accident turning the house into an inauspicious property that is difficult to sell in a society rooted in traditional values.
Four years after the debt is cleared, Ming gets into a large amount of debt again. However, at that point the marriage law has changed; husband and wife are no longer obligated to share debt. This change gave Feng the courage to divorce, but then she encountered other unexpected obstacles...
Director, Producer │LI Ke-liang
Keliang is a Chinese student pursuing an MFA degree in documentary filmmaking in New York. In May 2019, she researched about death education and interviewed Shatzi WEISBERGER, a death educator who hosted her own funeral and called it “FUN-eral”, encouraging people to truly appreciate death with positivity and openness.
Ironically, a week later, Keliang went back home only to find out that her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer a year ago, since the very day she left home for school. Her family contended a good lie to protect her from any emotional burden. With tremendous shock and sorrow and seeing the woman who taught her to appreciate life deteriorated in front of her, Keliang decided to film the last 20 days of her mom. Through the process she started to relearn the meaning of life.
Director │ Tenji TAKAKURA
Producer │ KANG Shi-wei, LIU Shan-shan
With the rapid ascendancy of Alibaba in 2000, online shopping has become a fixture of Chinese people’s daily lives. Orders from a billion people have led to an explosive development of the logistics industry to meet their demands. Today there are over 30 million truckers in China responsible for moving 80% of the total domestic cargo.
These people work endless hours, trading their lives and their health for money, while serving as an essential part of the modern Chinese economy. Dealing within an unregulated sector and vicious competition, they are left with one foot on the gas and the other on the doorstep to hell.
“Driving into the Storm” tells the story of these truckers and their families; it shows the risks and dangers they face while delivering online orders; and it exposes the painful and harsh reality hidden behind the veneer of China’s sudden prosperity.
Director, Producer │WU Mei-fen
After his grandfather died from COVID-19, his 83 year- old grandmother became HUANG’s only family. He kept his grandmother alive during isolation, when there was a shortage in medical resources and no one to turn to. He thought he was supposed to take good care of his grandmother in his grandfather’s place, but after his grandmother recovered and was discharged from hospital, they constantly fought and quarreled, finding it very difficult to be around each other. HUANG went as far as to resorting to violence and smashing things in the house. Because of the circumstances, HUANG’s grandmother started to have the idea of taking her own life. Huang in turn got more and more depressed and found himself in a predicament, not knowing what to do.
Director │ SU Mei-yu
Producer │ HUNG Po-hao
Half-buried in water due to perennial land subsidence, in the remote fishing villages of Yunlin county, Taiwan, you rarely see a young face, as the locals consider those losers who return to their hometown.
After recovering from a serious car accident, LIN Yun-chen reconsidered her life and decided to leave the city, returning to her hometown to look after her aging parents, who live alone in the fishing village. Apart from taking over her father’s job of fishing eel larvae in the sea, she also wants to start farming Asian tiger shrimp, for it is the taste of her childhood. It is, however, a risky enterprise in these surroundings, as it involves hard labor and much less time at home.
After the accident, she received a revelation and was bestowed with the ability to perform “siu-kiann” (Taiwanese exorcism) and interpret other’s problems, which became her new responsibility. In a conservative fishing village, the conflicts between the self, family and society play out ceaselessly within her. The success and failure of entrepreneurship, the lack of understanding from her parents, not even a medium like her could resolve these problems.
Director │ Amy IP Ka-man, YIP Man-hay
Producer │ LEE Yuen-ching
Yuli had been working as a migrant domestic helper in Hong Kong to support her family in Indonesia. After living in this Chinese society for over a decade, she loved the place and saw herself as a Hongkonger. In 2019, a massive social movement occurred. In view of insufficient information in Indonesian for her fellow workers, Yuli covered the protests on frontline and posted live- streams on social media. While she struggled to reveal the truth, Yuli was arrested by the Immigration Department over visa issue. Later she was accused of overstaying and was detained for a month before being deported to her hometown. Yuli has lost her job and suffered from PTSD. She wonders if she should write her experience in Hong Kong and continue pursuing her dream as a writer. Or is it better for her to be a migrant worker again? She doesn’t have a clue.
Director │HONG Jia-bao
Producer │LIU liu
Aishan is blind and lives in a massage shop in Beijing. She was ignored by her family for her disability and a nuisance to her colleagues for her frankness and quick wit. She yearned to find someone who truly loved her. Yet after several years of struggling, even this dream seemed unattainable. Therefore she gave up and started living for the day.
In the years I’ve known Aishan, too often I heard her complain about her life. I became, in her words, the only true friend she could talk to. I wanted her to try to change her life, but I discovered that there was no end to her abyssal problems. They crashed down as if from the sky, and she was destined to be trapped in them for her entire life.
Director │Jian FAN
Producer │Richard LIANG, S. Leo CHIANG
After the 2008 Sichuan earthquake razed a Chinese city to the ground, thousands of families lost their only child, and were permitted to try and have another, in an effort to fill the void created by this tragedy. Born to be Second follows two of these families. Mei and her husband Sheng had a biological son, Chuan, while their friends, Ying and her husband Ping, opted to adopt a daughter, Ran-Ran. Chuan, now 6, approaches the age of his late sister. He is starting to make sense of the unusual burdens his parents place on him, and of the wound that time has never healed. Ran-Ran, now 12, had always been told that Ying and Pin were her birth-parents. She can recall having lived somewhere else as a very young child, but she has chosen to accept her parents’ white lie. Soon, fragments of the truth will emerge and will be impossible for the family to confront together. Both families are arriving at critical junctures in their lives, challenging how they have been living for the past ten years.
Director │CHEN Yen-Hao
Producer │SHEN Tzu-Chi
Shu-Cheng KUO has just become the youngest village chief in Taiwan. As a 25-year-old fresh college graduate who identifies himself as a “rebellious leftist”, he is now in the front line of politics, facing mundane tasks, conservative system and the annoying elderly citizens––in his own words. He is constantly challenged by the residents. Conflicts can be caused by issues as trivial as free lanterns for Lantern Festival or as big as sidewalk renovation or the construction of Village Activity Center.
Is this young man really a good fit for a village chief? Does he see this position merely as a launchpad for his future political career or a possibility to break the pedantic political system? We might know the answer, but we can be sure that the four-year-long tenure is not going to be easy for KUO.
Director │ KANG Shi-wei
I am a middle class member of this country. From 2016, due to the government’s frequent promotion of internet finance and the promises they made, many Chinese citizens like me were induced by the advertisements for P2P online lending apps in many places to invest in P2P lending platforms, in, as the government put it, “the development of small and medium enterprises serving in China.” In the summer of 2018, Perhaps as a result of regulatory or integrity issues, the seemingly calm P2P industry saw a massive wave of company bankruptcies and shutdowns, commonly known as “ 暴雷 ” ( “bao lei, thunder strike.”) Millions of middle class people lost large sums of their savings. I was also one of its victims, losing over 200,000 US dollars. I wish, by producing this documentary, to restore the truth, and find a basic method to solve the online finance crisis in China.
Perhaps, I can get my money back.
Director │ HUANG Yin-yu
Producer │ So SUGAYA
HAYASHI Keiki, the second generation of Taiwanese immigrants, was born in Miyako Island, Okinawa. Although Professor HAYASHI succeeded in academic works, his identity made him isolated by colleagues with prejudiced belief. Such an anti-Chinese emotion was regarded to the unhumanity experiments by the pre-war Japanese-secret biological warfare Unit 731. More worse, some professors were the participants of experiments.
To leave the chaos behind, HAYASHI went to Dalian, China for several years. Yet, he was under attack on all sides when backing to Japan with extraordinary achievements. In 2001, an incident brought HAYASHI into a scandal and imprisonment. It then became the famous miscarriage of justice. The incident revealed the deep-rooted racial discrimination and Xenoglossophobia of Japanese society.
Director │JIN Hua-qing
Producer │WU En-xy, LI Xin-yi
Every winter, the nuns go through a100 days of meditation in a small wooden house on the mountain. It is still snowing heavily when they come out of the house, and no sign of spring.
Day by day, the youngest nuns labor away, carrying through work which would seem boring and neverending to ordinary people. These Tibetan girls are sent to the monastery by their families as a child, never to return to normal life and rarely goes home. The nuns kowtow in the mountains which is physically- exhausting, yet it is part of the lifelong meditation which eventually ends by death. The celestial burial is overtaken over by torrential rain, and the nuns’ crimson robes turn into gray butterflies in the flames. Most of them spend a lifetime in this monastery, and say goodbye to the world here. In the pith room, nuns and the Guru converse about life and death, where we came from and where we would go after.
This spring, many nuns were cast out of the monastery, as the land of bliss has at last fallen from atop. The nuns say goodbye to the Guru, who tells them nothing lasts forever: “Deep in our hearts, we must maintain compassion that cannot be conquered by others.”
Director │WU Yue
Producer │ Vincent DU
Thirty-year-old Sisi is a WBC Asia Title champion and the mother of a two-and-a-half-year-old boy. This year, 2019, will be her most challenging yet. Not only does she have the opportunity to fight in a potentially career-changing International Boxing Federation match, she is also resuming full-time care of her son, who has been living with his grandparents.
Sisi was born and raised in a conservative family who believe––as many do in China––that motherhood is a woman’s most important job. After her son was born, Sisi suffered severe postnatal depression. Boxing became her way out, a way to show the world she existed.
Sisi worked hard to get where she is. But how will she face these new challenges? How to maintain a gruelling training schedule and raise a young son? And what about having a second child?
Can Sisi win inside and outside of the ring?
Director │ DENG Wei
After MAO Se-zuo’s father got shot dead for selling drugs, her mother put her in the care of her uncle and went away to work. Her uncle had plenty of children, while also supporting the kids of relatives who were sent to jail for drug dealing. Tears and laughter filled the large poor family with more than a dozen children, as day by day the kids grew up as they await their parents’ return. When New Year came, the parents were all home as expected, except for MAO’s mother. It was rumored that she has been arrested for selling babies. MAO was certain this was all just hearsay and wished to ask her mother in person about the truth. After many twists and turns, she was ultimately not able to see her. Soon after, her cousin died of an accident. As life reared its ugly head time and again, would the child be left molded in her parent’s fashion, or could she retain her innocence and beauty, and break free from the cycle of fate?
Director │ ZHANG Yi-xing
Producer │LI Bo
It sounds impossible that people with hearing loss can sing. However, in Beijing Concert Hall, on August 4th, 2018, the impossible did become possible. “The Silence Choir”, consisting of 14 children with hearing loss, put on a special performance, all the audience members felt touched.
The story began five years ago, when artist LI Bo and musician ZHANG Yong wanted to record voice from people with hearing loss and use it in their works. The things that happened afterwards overturned their thoughts and changed their life. The songs from a voiceless world ask a question: what is the “correct” voice? Everybody is longing for real freedom and equality, but none of them has ever reflected what the standard of so-called “normality” should be. The controversy, media reports and applauses coming along, as well as issues such as children’s education, all followed.
This documentary tells a story about two groups of people who can’t have met before affect and remedies each other in the “impossible” world of music and art.
Director │ZHOU Hao
Producer │HE Shan
TONG, a psychotherapist, and YAO, a mime artist, both in their respective lives have encountered unexpected events. Notwithstanding the elapse of time, those events have been haunting as flashbacks every now and then. To live with the past, or even to reconcile––such has become one of the major issues they have to grapple with as they live on.
Desperately though, maybe ALL IN proves to be the only choice.
This film will thereby explore how people live together with their trauma and memory.
Director │LIU Chun-yu
Producer │REN Xiao-yu
The film crew selected two families for observational filming and has already tracked them for 8 years. In these 8 years, the long and winding journey of both families reflects the way the three systems of the Wa village "Wengding" in China (the headman, local community organization, and tourism systems) has changed in the course of time, and how their right to social organization has altered due to external intervention.
Director │YAN Da-zhong, LIU Zhuang
Producer │CHEN Yun-zhu
The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, western China, is the birthplace of many great rivers. Its geographical isolation miraculously retains an untouched natural environment and an intimate way of living with nature.
26-year-old Palden and his wife lived a traditional nomadic life in the mountains of Sanjiangyuan (“the source of three rivers” in Chinese). They wouldn’t worry about what was happening in the other parts of the world, only whether wolves would attack their horses when the sun went down and how to get through the long, cold winters. However, rapid development and a degrading environment is changing this way of living that Tibetans have maintained over thousands of years.
When Palden left his homeland of Sanjiangyuan, the source of himself and many rivers, and drifted to bustling and complex towns and cities, how did he address modernization in the context of his own philosophy of life?
Director │HU Tianjingsha
Producer │XU Wei-chao
When HU Tianjingsha was seventeen years old, he was sent off to the United States to attend high school in Maine, under his parents’ expectations of getting into a prestigious university and “becoming someone”. Going by the name of Vinnie, his school arranged him to stay with a German-American family. His host, Kathleen, held native American rituals in the house, sang Tibetan-Buddhist songs in the car, tempting Vinnie to search for a spiritually-liberated future. One night, a piece of music popped up in Vinnie’s dream and, convinced that the melody was related to Tibet, going there became Vinnie’s ultimate mission in life.
Director │Zed WANG
Producer │Tami XU
In the 1990s, as the Taiwanese economy took off and its entertainment industry dominated the Chinese-speaking world, LU Wen-chung was the head of the art department in several record and film distribution companies successively. To fulfill his dream as an artist, he gave up his high-salary job and went to America to study animation.
Wen-chung graduated with top marks and chose to return to Taiwan to build his dream kingdom, securing loans to set up his own film studio. However, as his mother died in a car crash, his land expropriated time and again, his father committed suicide, along with his mismanagement and failure to raise funds, the bitter reality steadily chipped away at his dream castle, and his studio slowly turned into a dust-covered warehouse.
Ten years have passed, and the confident young man who chased his dreams still can’t produce his first feature film. Did the changing times and industry advancements make artistic creation a luxury? Or is this all some quixotic dream?
Director │YANG Bo
Producer │XU Xiao-fei
Born to a family of ordinary nomads in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, Agaar belongs to the post-90s generation who learned to speak fluent English on his own, and returns home after working for three years on a cruise ship. Some people around call him a braggadocio, some who consider him as a hero. Agaar takes pressure upon himself as he tries to prove that he can be a “modern nomad” in the times of the Internet.
The life of a nomad is very dynamic. On the grassland, man and animal, man and man are connected in a simple yet touching way. In his own way, Agaar linked the city vs. the grassland; convenience vs. obsolence; the post-Industrial era vs. the primeval way of life. He would video chat with his friend in Dallas while feeding the cow on his piece of grass. The two extreme cultures find peace and harmony on Agaar.
Like most 29-turning-30 post-adolescents, Agaar tackles with family and career issues, and his reality bites are easily foreseen. Can Agaar’s nonchalantness and pride tide him through difficult times?
Director │WU Hsin-yu
Producer │Jerome WANG
Have you ever noticed the extra actors in the scene? Acting is a very mysterious job.If you are new to this business, you’ll certainly encounter a lot of difficulties such as low pay, long working hours, and no guarantee of future employment. But there are always people who want to chase their dreams, trying everything they can to get into the acting business. This film profiles the extra actors of different genders and generations in Taiwan.
They may have different backgrounds and issues in life, but they all looking for a stage to act, to become a top star. But as the industrial change in show business, some of them choose to build up their career locally in Taiwan; others take their chances in the blooming show industry of China.
For these actors who are in the bottom of the pyramid, will they win the success they want one day?
Director │WU Xiao-wen
Producer │SONG Jie, Veron LIN
In the remote mountainsof Teng Chong, Yunnan Province, lived an old nun with two adopted girls. This unusual formation of a family brought earthly troubles to the supposedly-holistic Buddhist convent. Not only does the old nun handle the daily trifles in the convent, but the growing pains of the two girls as well. One day, Master discovers that the older girl, SHI Dingyi, has fallen in love, and conflict of all sorts erupt within the family: the birthrights of the two girls, Master’s woes and distress from far and near, their similar ghosts of the past and increasing clearer future. Conflict reaches a point where Master has no choice but to send SHI Dingyi away, bringing only a short-lived peace to the convent, as SHI Yuanming begins to show the signs of teenage rebellion.
Director │ZHANG Lin
Producer │SU Guo-xiang
From age 15 to 22, ZHOU Zi-qi graduated from the top high school in Beijing and entered China’s top university. It was, however, a fall from grace for him, as he was unable even to maintain his mental well being. He was torn between his teachers’ hopes for him to become an academic elite, and his parents’ insistence on stability and making money. After graduation, ZHOU received a letter of admission from the University of Chicago in the United States. Could he recover his inner world and attain both his ideals in a new foreign environment?
Director │LI Wei
Producer │Edmond YANG, QIU Yang
Dazhang had been in bed for three years, his wife had abandoned the family. The family depended on two old men, three young children who did not understand why their father was ill and still grew up playfully.
Pneumoconiosis has torn the family apart, leaving it long- suffering and under the shadow of death. The unspeakable kinship of the Chinese community turns into scolding, complaining and accompanying in daily life.
In the children’s eyes, their father has long been moaning and scolding in the bed. Their father did not have a chance to express his love and tell his own children about the future before his death.
Director │Tim COLE
Producer │BaoBao CHEN
Small Island Big Song is a collaborative audio-visual-live project uniting indigenous musicians across the Pacific & Indian Oceans through song in the face of climate change and cultural loss. Spanning from Taiwan to Aotearoa/New Zealand, from Madagascar to Rapa Nui/Easter Island.
After 2 years of touring the world and releasing the award-winning album, Small Island Big Song is bringing the story back home.
As for the first peoples of the Oceans, before the written word, songs held the power, passing on the cultural knowledge, like how to live on an island with limited resources. And the fact is, we are losing these songs, when we need them the most.
Director │Covin CHENG
Producer │Ruby YANG
My partner, Akashi, and I have experienced five miscarriages for the past five or so years. It is a journey we rarely tell our family and friends. After our first miscarriage, we quickly sought medical assistance. We have done artificial insemination, such as IUI (Intrauterine Insemination) and IVF (In Vitro Fertilization). Each time to no avail.
This 2018, Akashi and I will face a difficult question: will this be the last time for IVF? We have been through this process so many times. There was a lot of physical and emotional stress. Yet, she insists that she wants to do it again the natural way. It would mean a world to her to experience the joys of pregnancy. As a partner, I can only look on and support her pursuit for a fulfilling motherhood.
Director │Amber LIU, Mark PAN, LEE Kang-ling
Producer │Amber LIU
“When the moment of succession comes, it is less the love for the traditional industries that we face, but the decision that we need to make, over and over again, to struggle over reproduction or innovation, over inheritance or disobedience.”
Called as the “Strawberry Generation” and the “Silenced,” Taiwanese born in the 1970s and the 1980s deal with the hardest question: succession.
This young yet distressful generation is taking over the traditional industries, at a time when neither the future of the industries is promising, nor the success of their father’s generation is able to be achieved again.
This series demonstrates Taiwan’s traditional industries that have been planted and cultivated by American, Chinese, and Japanese powers. By interviewing and tracking the successors in the face of localization appeals, entangled geopolitics, and globalization challenges, this series reveals ways of development and the confession from the younger generation in Taiwan.
Director │GU Tao
Producer │ GAO Wei
With a focus on ethnicity, this documentary is filmed in the largest city in Inner Mongolia, Hohhot, where ethnic culture and modernization inter-mingle with one another.
For eight years, Hukefu has devoted himself to making a documentary about Buryat Shamanism. He feels being scolded by his ancestors; he longs for freedom after drinking, affected by a sense of loneliness...
Wurigen’s psychological world was shattered by the passing of his father. He considers returning to the prairies of freedom. Looking afar with a smile on his face, he fears that if he stops playing morin khuur, his father will be even more distant from him...
Suhe comes to the city from the prairies on his own. The dazzling lights on the stage cannot smooth away his loneliness. Embedded within the singing and management of his daily life is his solitude...
A sunny day, a cloudy day; youthfulness, depression—all in this city.
Director │CHEN Chang-qing
Producer │ GUO Heng-qi, YU Ying-ying
Songzhuang town in Beijing houses the largest group of contemporary artists by far. The filming period lasted nearly 5 years. In this film, you will witness the key role GuTao and three other artists’ real life. The story among them and the destinies of the four are overlapping and associated together. The audience can not only see a picture of this era, but also could strongly feel the irresistible tide of the reality.
The artists who play a role as the reminders and prophets of their time, as well as the documentary directors who are good at bringing other people’s life to the screen. What’s their life like when facing the hard reality, honor and fame?
Director │WANG Lei
Producer │ Jackie C. LIN
In the urban village named Pi Village, there are nearly 30 thousand migrant workers and their children from all over the country, who build Beijing with their hands.
This documentary tells the story of 4 people living in the Pi Village-a lover of art, a pupil, a girl who is going to break into a marriage by breaking through a lot of obstacles, and a young man who has been walking on the road to ask for salary and the pursuit of love.
With this film, we will record the hot youth and dream of the common workers in China.
Director │Sayun Simung
Producer │KUO Yu-nung, Hung Sung-ju
Grandpa Wilang passes away, but Grandma Yabay cannot face his death. Unable to accept the fact that her under-aged granddaughter giving birth to a child, Grandma Yabay refuses to let her come home. Despite the company of her family members, in the first year, Grandma Yabay still fails to recover from the grief over the loss of her loved one.
Gaga, the traditional habit of the Tayal people, bonds the everyday lives of this Tayal family. Through Spi (dream), the Tayal people connect with their ancestors and receive signs about life. After the leader of this family dies, one by one, the family members of the director dream about his return.
With the passing of time, we keep having dreams about Grandpa as if he never left us and continued to live with us.
Director │ DukarTserang
In his previous live, he was her husband. In this life, he is her grandson. He is the same person.
In her previous life, she was his wife. In this life, she is his grandmother. She is the same person.
This year, the ages of the two combined are one hundred years. They live together under the same roof.
Director, Producer │LONG Miao-yuan
Confucius died 2497 years ago, but his golden rules are still practiced by successors in contemporary China. Mrs. MENG from Northeast China found her life beacon shining from Taiwan at middle age. She soon gave up all her business and started a private school in Shenzhen (next to Hong Kong) to provide Neo- Confucianism education as alternative to families who can’t trust mainstream schools. MENG soon became nation-wide famous, but her private school was illegal in China. However, the force inherited from Confucius was so strong that MENG soon changed a sail. She is now targeting on 0~3 years old babies.
Director │ XU Hui-jing
Producer │ LIANG Yuan
Under the guidance of a 70-year-old guy, a group of orphans and problem children practice baseball in the suburbs in Beijing. MA Hu’s joining breaks the tranquility of the team. He gangs with others to fight and scuffle, becoming a thorn in the team members and the coach’s flesh. A huge fire in Beijing cleansed the city of millions of people, while their baseball field is ordered to move elsewhere in a limited time.
After half a year, the team is representing the Asian Pacific region to attend a world-class baseball tournament in the United States. Are they able to untie together, overcoming many a difficulty and achieving their self-breakthrough? What will happen to the fate of these children in future?
Director │ZHOU Hao
Producer │HE Shan
The three girls from the village in the mountains have their own dreams in their childhood. With the progress of time, they have to deal with more and more real-life and practical issues. One quits school to work at the age of 15, while one continues her schooling. The lives of the tens of millions of young Chinese people from the country might be completely documented in the film for the first time.
Director │LO Yi-shan
Producer │WU Fan
In the snowmelt season of 2017, Taiwanese trekkers LIANG Shen- yueh and LIU Chen-chun were found in a cave in Nepal after reported missing for 55 days. Chen-chun had already passed away, while the surviving Shen-yueh broke the world record of being trapped in the mountain before rescued. The media all over the world came to interview him.
Shen-yueh brought back Chen-chun’s last will. In one of the letters, she told me not to be excessively sorrowful, and to learn to love others. I therefore take up my camera to cope with Chen- chun’s unfinished wish. Things started to change, however, as I returned to school and Sheng-yueh began his new work.
In the snowmelt season, some things would be recovered under the sun, some forever gone with the water. After the incident, in what ways could we remember the past to walk forward into the future?
Director │ CHAN Ying-wai
Producer │ LI Man-chi
“Freedom through Art” is the motto gong-bi painter Wilson SHIEH believes in.
Wilson SHIEH was born and raised in Hong Kong. While he has been moving deftly in the international contemporary art market, SHIEH already foresaw the constraints from the market. His contradictory character constantly puts him in between the extremes: the traditional versus the contemporary, market concerns versus freedom to create, and individual versus society.
Facing the recent socio-political tension in Hong Kong, how would Wilson SHIEH go on?
Director │ Sean WANG
Producer │ ZHAO Jia
The camera follows a piece of white marble and records how it was cut and mined at the Greek mines and shipped to China. In the Chinese factory, it was made into a Greek-style tourist souvenir, and then sold back to Santorini via Yiwu, the Chinese town of the world commodity, to be purchased by the Chinese couple who are in Santorini for their wedding photography and be decorated in their Greek-style house in China. In the process of its return trip along the chain of international trade, this stone is like the ancient Greek hero Odysseus, who re-embarks on the Odyssey journey in the era of global capitalism.
Director │ Elvis LU
Producer │ LI Jian-liang
A-chi, my elder brother, was psychic since the age of twelve. From then on, he served as a medium at home to help others, and my questions about him emerged. I had my doubts because, despite the fact that many believers had received his help, he himself remained unable to lift the family out of poverty. My gambling-addicted father believed that gods would one day bless him with some lucky numbers via my brother; my mother, on the other hand, had sincerely prayed to gods for good health, yet her conditions simply kept deteriorating. Such helplessness had long detached myself from my family of origin. It wasn’t until I devoted myself to documentary filmmaking that I began to often ask myself, “When I make an effort to understand others’ lives, why don’t I try to understand that of my own brother, too?” And how would my family deal with my coming home and questioning?
Director │HAN Meng
Producer │ Vincent DU
Langfang, one of the most air-polluted cities in China, is located 40 kilometers away from Beijing. In order to safeguard the air quality of the capital, Langfang is under huge pressure. Director LI has instituted a series of controversial policies to deal with pollution; at the same time, as an outspoken local official, LI has published three novels featuring the smog. This documentary chronicles the power struggle between the people and the authority, as a city juggles the costs and benefits of its actions in its attempt to tackle smog pollution.
Director │JIN Xingzheng
Producer │ZHANG Chao
This documentary records the living experiences of seven armless artists and their realliving conditions at the moment. They share similar miseries in their lives, but they do not give in to the adversity and break forth with the courage and power to move forward. With their own mouth and feet, they strive for more valuable results and achievements; with their feet firmly on the ground, they prove their self-esteem through actions.
Eventually, these seven armless artists voluntarily hold a charity bazaar with their own works, as a way to pay back and offer thanks to the society. The revenue is to be used for the construction of a building in the impoverished mountain area in Yunnan: Qi Zi (lit. seven persons) Hall.
Director │ ZHANG Nan
Producer │QI Yu, Ansell Durwin Uy TAN
Modern China is restoring the ancient Great Wall. Amongst the northern mountains, a dilapidated section Xifengkou, historically known as a pivotal battle field during the anti-Japan war, welcomes a group of builders. Government officials, craftsmen, farmers and fishermen are brought together. Each with their own intentions and perspectives.
The LI and JIA families are neighbouring fishermen at the foot of the wall, yet they are stranger than strangers. Both see each other as “outsiders” but are forced to reconcile disputes due to conditions brought forth by the restoration project.
Civil engineer ZHU is a cautious man by nature. Leading the builder team based in the LI family homestay, he stumbles upon trouble and dissonance caused by the JIA family. Facing doubt from all sides, he must prove himself worthy despite the geographical and man-made barriers.
Within the wall’s borders, the WANG family’s traditional brick kiln has supplied the Great Wall and Forbidden City for generations. Differences in business approach causes conflict and disappointment between father and son. As an order of bricks for Xi-fengkou’s restoration project is placed, WANG puts his son through the test.
Director │LEE Kang-ling
Producer │ HSU Huai-min
In 1949, after WWII, a group of people followed Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan due to the civil war. They lived together in Single Veteran Dormitory. They believed that they could return soon, but the survivors live there to this day. However, their spirits drift on the narrow yet deep Taiwan Strait with questions: Are their parents, wives and children still alive? When cross-strait visits were finally allowed, they found their answers. Some answers brought joy, some brought tears...
It was a migration, pulled by the tide of the era. This is a story of those who are fading away. On the footsteps of a person carrying cremated remains of old veterans back home, we witness the despair and serenity of the era.
Director, Producer │ CHEN Song
This is a story about a girl who was born after 1995 and looked for her way out in a broken family and an age of fragmentation. Lianlian was a seventeen-year-old cyber celebrity who dreamed about getting famous and rich overnight. But the reality was cruel since her parents were getting a divorce and her family was on the verge of destruction. Her academic record was therefore affected and she barely graduated. Her mother was a policewoman who practiced Buddhism and Taoism, and was scammed by swindlers. Her father, on the other hand, left home with a cat. Lianlian, however, never abandoned her hope about life, so she chose to escape from her school and family, threw herself in the cyberworld and embarked on a journey of which the prospects remained unknown.
Director │ WANG Jia-yin
Producer │ Ada ZHU
Barber Mario in Torino, Italy, small business owner Ming in Russia, XIE, who just got to Rwanda to look for business development, and HE, who just got released from prison. Although the individuals in question are not in the same place and have very different life from one another, they do have one thing in common – they are all webcast hosts. They reveal their own lives to the public in the virtual world for their own different purposes. We spent about a year to observe and excerpt their webcast to explore their alienation induced by cyber life.
Director │ Jonathan YANG
Producer │ YANG Meiwen
During the Cold War, the best of the best pilots of Republic of China conduct secret missions for the CIA. The film documents how they believe in their dream and how their fearlessness writes down the Black Cat Squadron’s story that will go down in history. They always joke that, “the true heroes are the ones that die in the battlefield; the ones that remain are pariahs.” However, it takes killings to make heroes. Let us re-examine the definition of heroes. Is a time when heroes are not needed the most beautiful of times?
Director │ LEE Chien-cheng
Producer │ HUANG Te-sheng
A group of Taiwanese people hired by U.S. Army’s nutrition laboratory station during the U.S. Aid period. Working for them was considered proud and glorious at that time, for it came with not only good salary but also an opportunity to learn Western culture. The staff witnessed the large resource and the research the U.S. Army in Taiwan. The locals used to call the station building “White House.” From “White House” came the sound of babies crying from time to time. The local people made various stories about this sound. Forty years later, we are revealing the secrets behind the experiment in the U.S. Aid period.
Director │KANG Shi-wei
Sonam Darge was born a romantic person, he loves writing poems. He entered the Seda Buddhist academy at six years old and vowed to be a monk for life. His dream was to be a poet like living Buddha Tsangyang Gyatso. The surroundings of the Seda Buddhist academy is so heavenly that Sonam created many beautiful poems there. Sonam eventually grew up, he joined the real society. But at one point of his life, his brother died, in which he found out that neither science nor gods could help him. In addition, city people were cold to him for unnamed reasons, and the government refused to publish his poems. He witnessed the slow death of the Tibetan culture and started to grow his hatred against the mainstream society. But, then, he quit being a monk! He chose love over religion. Sonam grew up with a girl who happened to have had a crush on him for 17 years and he married her. Because of love, Sonam joined society, became a successful businessman and ended up married in the secular world.
Director │PAN Zhi-qi
Producer │ Mike SHANG
Ms. HU was conned into a large amount of debt. Affected by her feeling of guilt, she fled to Shibati (Eighteen Steps), Chongqing, converted to Christianity and made a living by running an inn and by scavenging. From the trash she gathered she built a splendid garden. In her mind, it is her garden of heaven and her emotional support. She hoped that her mental strength can free her son from depression. Her son, Shao-bin, is a homosexual afflicted with AIDS, and thus depression. For him, the spiritual world her mother built for herself and dwells in is sheer absurdity. With the rapid development of business, the eviction of Shibati was imminent. Shao-bin tried to convince her mother to leave the region and face reality.
Director │ XIAO Xiao
Producer │ LIN Lin
The film revolves around the vexations and struggles of three generations in a tiny mountain village. 80-year-old grandma still labors hard for the family. She burns incense and prays day after day for fear of her approaching death, and asks her son to come back to be with her. After her son returns home, he can only do odd jobs in the woods and becomes increasingly impoverished and anxious. Her grandson, tired of being a migrant worker in the city, comes back to the mountains and starts his business of poultry farming, but ends up with a complete failure and gravely indebted. Meanwhile, her neighbor, uncle Li unwillingly comes back home after his eye gets injured at work, and suddenly loses all source of income...
The surrounding mountains tightly bind them together in their fates, just as the giant “Turtle Rock” at the gate of the village. It is said that a turtle endeavored to transcend itself into the heavenly realm, but got his head severed from its body by thunderbolt and fell unto this village. His body was then turned into rock and the village was named after it, echoing this mountain legend.
Director │JIANG Chun-hua
Producer │WANG Xin-xuan
“This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point... in which the slightest movements are supervised...”──Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Taohua (peach blossom) Work-Study School is a juvenile reform school where boys and girls are strictly kept separate. It is divided into two segments; the Upstairs and Downstairs. The former contains students who are sent here by their parents, while the latter contains students sent by Public Security Bureau for criminal offenses. The two segments are separated by a path. Interaction of any kind is strictly forbidden.
The story follows Li Wenjun’s journey of becoming the class leader, and Leigong and and Chanjuan’s puppy love; they are in love and yet are separated by the separation rule. The two storylines converge by the time of New Year celebration and each takes a dramatic turn.
Here where peach is in bloom, will friendship and love find their own place?
Director │YONG Shu-ling
Producer │Lisa TEH
Meixi is a young educator from Singapore who’s passionate about changing the way learning happens in classrooms of marginalized students. She introduces Tutorial Relationships (TR), a concept that turned around 9,000 of the worst-performing schools in Mexico, to a group of struggling students in Singapore. Suddenly, demotivated students are transformed into confident mini- teachers. The shift in dynamics is met with great enthusiasm! But the extra demands take a toll and TR’s sustainability is questioned. Will this deviation from the norm be a game-changer or a passing-phase? Join Meixi’s journey to help students fall in love with learning and gain a rare insight into the lives of teenagers whose stories we seldom see and hear.
Director │FU Yue
Producer │HUNG Tin-yi
The story of bidding youth farewell and marching into maturity happens in young people’s life around the world. In this film, the protagonists’ dream lies in the pursuit of a better country through revolting against the system. Whereas their struggle has become part of history in the turmoil of Cross-Strait relations.
A star activist rebelling against China, a popular Chinese student who adores Taiwan, and I, a documentary filmmaker passionate about politics. Insurmountable contradictions were expected among us, and yet we found the possibility of collaboration in social movement. In this most significant social movement in the past 24 years in Taiwan, we came so close to succeeding, only to end up tumbling down to the deepest valley of disappointment. Can we still have the ideals we once so firmly believed in?
Director │CHAN Tze-woon
Producer │Peter YAN
He works in an LCD monitor manufacturing plant all his life and has borne witness to the changes in the electronic industry; he, for decades, runs a luncheonette in the old district, but his dream of having a peaceful life might be snuffed out by urbanization; he gives up a steady city job, refusing government handout, in order to fight for basic human rights for his daughter, who suffers from muscular dystrophy. Nearing the final decade of their lives, three men reminisce 1967 Hong Kong Riots, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen Square Protest. As Hong Kong’s turbulent past flashes before our eyes, the tapestry of history reveals a charged and uncertain 21st Century Hong Kong.
Director │LI Jie
Producer │ ZHOU Hao
There was an odd town in Hu-nan, China. Most Chinese from villages had no idea of what a car was in the 1980s, but this town had already had its own motorcades. It used to be a “fashionable” town. The movie theater here played the latest movies. It is remotely located in the mountains that are difficult to reach but local young people were dressed in the trendiest outfit. This town is located in a poor county, but its people were widely respected, and they even were considered rich when they went to a big province like Guangdong. This town is called, “Mei-tian.” However, most people moved out of the town in the early 1990s almost over night. No one knew where they went to. Lost Hometown is a representative Chinese town in the south that goes through industrial transitions. There were almost a hundred thousand people coming to this mining town to work their lives for an industry that continues losing money only to leave for other places at the end of their lives.
Director │TENG Zhong-kai
Producer │CHANG Xian-min
From 1957 to 1960, 300,000 people from Chun’an and Sui’an County, Zhejiang, were forced out of their hometown because of the construction of Xinanjiang Hydroelectric Station. It was the time of “the Great Leap Forward,” when actions could only be the result of commands and every deed done was for the realization of communism. Immigrants could in no way choose their own fate. During the Great Leap Forward, the far-left ideologies prevailed, and thus the evictees were never properly relocated. It was chaos and disorder; most of the evictees were never recompensed reasonably, nor were proper arrangements be made for them. Decades have elapsed, and yet these historical issues remained unsolved. Now a large number of immigrants are still suffering from the aftermath.
Director │Homa CHEN
Producer │Wendy LIANG
My seven-month pregnant wife and I arrived in L.A. in December 16th, 2014 in preparation of delivering our first baby. Accommodated in the house were pregnant women from all over China. Some of them were here to be away from the Chinese family planning policy, others from the smog, and still others from the examinations in the education system, etc. Although the trend of delivery babies overseas takes place in the United States, this trend manifests the anxiety and difficult situation facing the Chinese middle class. Why do they choose to leave China? After experiencing different cultures and crushed by different lifestyles, do they stay until the end or return home?
Director │ Mickey LUAN, Tommaso MUZZI
This documentary is a letter to my father in film form. It is a documentation of an immigrant family, about its drifting and then eventually settling down here in Taiwan, and about my father’s inceptive quest. I want to understand him, and in turn understand the shadows that have been looming over all of the family – the shadows my father refused to talk about and even lied to conceal, the shadows that are the grief the family were unable to stare in the face.
This is a confession of a Chinese Korean family, of an Outlander family, and of a Taiwanese family.
Director │ Jess HAO, Kiwi CHAN
Producer │ ZHOU Hao
Facing the pressure of illegal immigration, the Government of Portuguese Macau granted three amnesties between the 1980s and the 1990s; issuing more than 70,000 residents permits for immigration.
Following reunification with mainland China, Ms. Lan established an organization that fights for the families that cannot benefit from the immigrant policy.
Through the lives of the leader Ms. Lan, her close friend A-Mei and Mei, who conceals her identity as an protestor, the film explores the impact immigrants have on their families and the society, and how the society treat its immigrants.
Director │ Martin CHEN
Producer │ Diana Chiawen LEE, Gwyneth CHEN
Jeff graduates from business school with a bright future. He enters a prestigious investment firm and climbs up the corporate ladder, becoming the definition of success and his parents’ pride. But at 33, Jeff drops his 7-figure salary job for the world of Mix Martial Arts (MMA).
Jeff’s change of course comes at a price: his parents argue over his recklessness; his marriage disintegrates; the grueling training pushes Jeff's body to the brink. But Jeff is determined to become the first Taiwanese fighter to win the championship belt. For Jeff, this isn’t about winning; it’s about finally daring to pursue his dream.
Director │ CHEN Dong-nan
Ping and Sheng are young members of a Miao ethnic village church choir, which resides in the wild mountaintop in Yunnan, China. In the 1910s, western missionaries brought the Gospel here and taught the villagers to sing in four-part harmony, which they passed down from generation to generation. Ping is the most beautiful girl in the village. Sheng is determined to become a missionary.
Recently, the choir was discovered by the county government, which branded the village as a hidden refuge of exotic minority people who, for some strange reason, can sing classical European music. The choir stands under national spotlight. Tourists flock to the mountains. Real estate developers plan to rebuild the village. Ping and Sheng's lives take vastly different paths than they’d planned.
Director │ WANG Yang
Producer │ WANG Guo-qing
In Wuhan, China, people want to build a mega-bridge across the Yangtze River.
The bridge symbolizes the speed and power of China. Under enormous pressure, the engineers are exhausted mentally and physically. The individual experience of life is intertwined with the institutional stress. Leaving hometowns for the city, peasant workers from all over the country have come here for better life. Due to the rapid development in China over the last 30 years, hundreds of millions of peasant workers have come to the city. They contribute to the the construction of China, and bear the drastic changes brought by it; they are away from their family; they put it all out to work; while the farmlands are abandoned and traditions lost.
Director │ZHAO Chang-tong
ZHAO Sheng-rong was my grandfather’s name. He was bereaved of his mother when he was a child, of his father an adolescent. In wartime, he alone took up the responsibility of supporting the whole family. In his middle age he married and begot three sons. Because of his cultural background he got to work for China Railway till retirement. Chinese opera had his love. He was a regular at the theatre. In his later years, his house was demolished by force. Dust was returned to dust. Suddenly he was gone forever. It was not until then that I realized the familiarity one felt about a person and an emotion could be halted abruptly and could never be had again.
Director │HU Bo
The wording “zone of subsidence” co-exists with “mining.” It is related to human civilization and social development, whereas it can only be found in the shadow of past glory. The film narrates the past and the present in the zone of subsidence, mainly through the story of the relocation of the elderly Fengling YANG and his family that live in the zone of subsidence in Fushun City, Liaoning Province. Revealing the wound of a resource-exhausted city from one side, the film presents the symbiotic karma of men and nature as well as the perplexity and the persistence of the residents under the change.
Director │ Jill LI
Producer │ Samuel CHAI
Can the thousand-year-old story of ill-fated peasant uprisings in China be altered? This is a story of the trials and tribulations endured by the people of one small, traditional fishing village by the sea of Shanwei, Guangdong. In 2011, villagers staged their own “Wukan Spring” in an effort to protect their land and overthrow their “Shanwei Quaddafi”, the incumbent village chief who had ruled for 40 years. Two years later, while enthusiastically campaigning for the young Xing’s second run for village office, Hong was forced to flee to the United States. And the former protest hero Lin Zuluan found himself facing unexpected dangers. A Village By the Sea documents the political awakening of a village, it’s two democratic elections, along with the tumultuous lives of three generations.
This is a story of hopes and dreams sown into the land of the people. This film depicts the complex realities and uncertainty now China is faced with.
Director │ Tenzinsedon
Producer │ Ming
Tsekhor is one of the circumambulation paths surrounding Potala Palace. Once the path was only trodden by the pilgrims, whereas now it is full of travelers and vendors. On one side of Tsekhor lied a big wide road; on the other the forever standing Potala Palace. Nested in-between, Tsekhor seemed like Lhasa in miniature. The three protagonists in the film were born at different times and in different places. However, they all relied on this path for their living. Their intertwining destinies reflected the modernization of an ancient city.
Director │ WU Po-hung
Producer │ KUNG Hsiang-heng, CHENG Jing-ru
When the Himalayan snow melted, Chung-yuan Yang embarked for the village of Tashi, at the immense altitude of 4,500 meters above sea level. In 2015, he returned for the tenth time, like a migratory bird.
Director │ CHENG Ching-hsin
Producer │ LIU Chia-hsin
The first time I heard the name Jiong-lin, I just returned from afar. Friends were recounting the night when he didn’t come home and the following day when the icy body was fished from the river. More and more of those who knew him uttered his name, and recounted their memories of him.
Jiong-lin made three journeys around the island on foot, and recorded them in his diary. Retracing his steps, other friends and I embarked on the same journey. We walked upon the paths he had trodden, visited the people he had met, and tried to put pieces of the stories together.
I gaze upon this island, onto which he had given his passion. His existence resembled a bridge that connected all the different places, and all the people who, each in their own way, strived to live on this island.
He, had become this island.
Director │ YU Guo, GUO Rong-fei
In China, 16 million women are married to gay men without knowing. These women are called Homowives. As Director YU documents the stories of three women of this group, the idea of coming out to his mother crossed his mind. But not until he turned the camera to his mother and reflected on the role he plays did he realize that, as a homosexual man in China, whichever choice he makes , whether out of helplessness or powerlessness, would inevitably drag a woman into an inescapable tragedy.
Director │ Han YAN
Producer │ Eddie LIU
Zhang-ning was a white-collar worker in Foshan. She obtained no sense of satisfaction from work. The life of a city had wearied her. Lost in life, she embarked on a journey to Yunnan. There, she encountered a Mosuo man.
Bingma is a lively, handsome young man. Backpackers had thus nicknamed him the Andy Lau of Lugu Lake. Among all songs stored in the MP3 tourists gave him, his favourites are Enigma from Germany and Jay Chou from Taiwan.
Zhang-ning and Bingma had met and fallen in love on the shore of Lugu Lake. One of them aspired to return to nature; while the other sought to be connected to the city. Under the rapid development in China, the two of them started a cross-cultural love story unfavoured by others, regardless of their very different background; one of the city, the other of the countryside.
Director │ WU Jian-xin
Young farmer JIANG and his wife PING return to the countryside from the city, diving into Buddha sculpture carving and invites Buddhist Gang WANG to the village to give them instructions for carving. Their life of making Buddha sculptures may seem stuck in a rug; it is their process of religious practice. The documentary is a complete record of the making of a Buddha sculpture and their aloof lifestyle. It was also tells of influence brought by their change of life on the Buddha sculpture making. Is it possible for farmers that no longer farm and urbanites that are away from the city to find the wonderland in the bottom of their hearts respectively from this simple and tranquil country life?
Director │ WANG Jian-jun
Producer │ HAN Lei
Chou: He was once the only ceramist in an old village, making a living from selling his works. But the sudden development of tourism brought him numerous competitors, whose techniques were much newer, cheaper, and more efficient. Although Chou made up his mind to preserve traditional skills, he eventually failed in the battle against modernity.
Yang: Decades ago, he wandered to this village and saved a retarded girl’s life. After that, they depended upon each other for life. Yang’s job was to deliver ceramic funerary objects to the cemetery, but the pay was very little. In order to apply for pension from the government, old-aged Yang was planning to go back to his hometown for a legitimate citizenship.
Liu: Yang’s neighbor. Several years ago, he came to this village for a job. However, he was finally laid off due to old age. His wife ran away from home and left two children behind. To raise the children, Liu had no choice but to keep looking for a new job.
Director │ HOU Ning
Producer │ Gary SHIH
Hundreds of thousands of Muslims from the Muslim area in western China open noodle shops in the mainland. This was also the last resort for the 14-year-old MA Xiang, after he dropped out from school. For him, happiness was the brief moments he remembered sharing with his mother. When he tried to find back the missing moments, he found himself facing conflicts between faith and beliefs as well as the challenges of reality and survival. Is this tiny noodle shop going to be the starting point of his own happiness?
Director | Vincent DU, HAN Meng
Producer | Kathy Huang
China’s National Children is a character-driven documentary exploring the lingering impact of China’s controversial one- child policy. We intimately follow the journey of several women who search for their families that abandoned them decades ago. We also meet a passionate volunteer who attempts to facilitate these reunions. Through these experiences we are given a unique insight into the deep wounds that the one child policy inflicted on ordinary citizens.
We meet several women who are reunited with their birth parents through the volunteer’s efforts. Cai Fengxia has been looking for her birth parents for 12 years. Zhang Chunrong didn’t learn about her biological parents’ abandonment until her adopted parents passed away. Li Junfen doesn’t want to be reunited with her biological parents despite a matching DNA sample with her biological mother, who drowned two of her baby daughters in the 1970s.
Director │ CHEN Siyi
Producer │ XU Ruohan
Dr. Wu, Dr. Lee and Dr. Shen work at the ER of a small hospital in China. They are in different stages of their life, but they all face a career crisis.
Dr. Shen is secretly considering early retirement after a patient murdered a doctor at a nearby hospital.
Dr. Lee treats his patients with a cynical attitude ever since the family of a patient threatened him at knifepoint.
Dr. Wu is young and optimistic, but deep inside, he’s troubled by the death of a patient he failed to save. He fears violent retribution if he makes the same mistake again.
Despite their concerns, all three of them stick to their jobs. But, how much longer can they hold up?
Director │ CHEN Qi
In 1990, I was born in Huainan, to a miner father. In the same year, economic reform was launched in China. As a consequence, the city was hit by the first of its many economic crises. When I was seven, the city was hit by the second. My mother chose to leave the family, so my father raised me to adulthood. In 2014, the crisis befell the city for the third time, and countless families were dragged into this vortex of misfortune. I chose my family, my father, godmother and my two friends who worked in mining after the 90s as my protagonists. I based the story on my family and recounted the incidents the miner families had to go through when the city, economically dependent on natural resources, met its decline; what the miners earned could barely support their family, their contracts were terminated against their will. When it is time for them to build up a family, to marry and to bear children, how will they deal with the problems they were faced with? How will they put up a resistance within the frame of the system? How will they manage to survive? And how will the city change in turn?
Director │ Sean WANG
Producer │ ZHAO Jia
Decades ago, nearly 10,000 Chinese moved to Greece to engage in trading business. Now as the refugee crisis broke out, millions of refugees took the same path they had trodden before. The “big sis” CHEN Xue-yan, along with other Greek Chinese decided to organize a volunteer group to help the refugees. This was the first time that they walked out of the self-contained Chinatown and offered their help to strangers in their second home. A unique symbiosis has formed among the Greek indigenous people, Chinese and the refugees, on this land of gods. Will the “Chinese method,” on which they insist, really give the refugees the help they need?
Director │ Maso CHEN
Wenlin Elementary School is a long-established school. The newly appointed principal Mr. Chu and young Director of Student Affairs Mr. Lai just introduced a financial education initiative which included setting up a bank and issuing currency in the school.
At the beginning of this year, Bank of Wenlin started operation among thirteen pioneering classes assisted by their teachers. Students were all very excited when they received their “salaries” and became more active in taking part in the manual labor at school. Gradually, some teachers noticed how students became overly utilitarian, and thus started to reflect on whether their own concept of money have brought adverse effects on their students.
Director │ MA Chi-hang, Machi, CHENG Wai-sum, Haze
When the harbor in Hong Kong first opened up, a group of people lived on boats and moved wherever they find catches of fish. They called themselves “boat people” and excelled at expressing themselves in singing. They transformed the stages of a life journey, “birth, aging, illness, and death,” into melodies and lyrics. This film tells the stories of three boat dwellers: an old man retiring to an island and singing songs of stories to entertain visitors; a Jesus-reclaiming lady who used the fishermen’s melodies to sing Gospels; and a Hong Kong woman picking garbage by the harbor. Through their life experiences, family lives, and religions, an ignored group of people was reconstructed to preserve the disappearing memories. Living on the sea seem romantic, but is in fact full of bitter sufferings that none wants to look back. Beyond the seafront is the sorrow and joy, all carried in the fishermen’s ballads.
Director │ MO Jin-jin
Producer │ Eddie XING
Ming’s family is part of the Tankas, the last boat dwellers in China. For thousands of years, the Tankas lived on water, but now the modern civilization slowly invaded and took away the tranquility on water. As they face the choices to go ashore or not, the three generations of Ming’s family each have an idea of their own. In 2010, Ming just turned 18 and was determined to move on land. However, misfortune had since followed him to places. His father also considered moving ashore because of the reducing fish load resulted from the deteriorating environment. Whereas the 80-year-old grandmother still hoped to be born and to die on water. Nevertheless, the official letter arrived and ordered everyone to move ashore, igniting the burning conflicts inside everyone of the three generations. Would they be able to return to the peaceful life they used to have?
Director │ CHOU Wen-chin
Preserved in Huang-gang Fishing Port in northern Taiwan is a fishing technique rarely seen in the world, called sulfuric fire fishing. It is a unique approach dying out due to being of little economic benefit. After reaching the age of fifty, the HSIEH brothers returned home to inherit the family fishing boat, Yong- Yu-Fa, the oldest and smallest of four remaining boats still utilizing this special technique. The two of them had to learn everything from the beginning, and after running the business for a few years, they began to consider giving it all up because it was far from easy. Trapped between their all too real economic concerns and the sense of having a mission to preserve this traditional fishing method, will they find the inspiration to hang on and find a balance, striking the sparkling light of life?
Director │ LIU Liu
Producer │ LI Xiao-wei
Dongguan in China has always been known as “Men’s Paradise”. In 2014, the local government started a thorough clean up that brought the entire sex industry down to the ground. But did the clean up really make the city clean? Does the fall of the industry have any butterfly effect over other industries? How will those girls make their living afterward? Do men that are in to prostitution give up their psychological addiction because of the clean up? This documentary is going to look in fine detail at how the chain of the industry in this city has changed by listening to the accounts of those involved.
Director │ WANG Sean, Chris CHEN
Producer │ WANG Sean
The only Chinese employee that has worked in the European Union, GAI Lin joins an international election team in the UK to run a campaign for a Conservative Party candidate, senator Delwald, to be reelected to the European Council. But he thinks Delwald’s ideas about anti-immgration are an act of nationalism and refuses to canvass for him. As an immigrant himself, Delwald asks immigrants to distribute flyers against immigrants. GAI and two cameramen are forced to canvass. GAI leaves the birthday party of his employer feeling injustice and anger. He invites immigrants to the campaign headquarters to have a party of his own. On election day, GAI gets fired from the team. Running a sharp tongue and mean words has made him the nationalist he despises.
Director │ SUN Yang
Producer │ Wendy HUANG
The artist MA Liang decides to make a “time machine” when he realises his father, who has accompanied and influenced him his whole life, is losing his memories due to dementia. With puppets made by himself and his Time Machine, MA Liang travels back to the times he and his father have experienced together and expresses his unbreakable bond with his father.
Director │QIAN Siru
It’s the winter of 2014, there are not a lot of people around grandma anymore. Grandma has been exhausted by an ill father and the little brother that are trying to get away from her. The harder grandma tries to love them, the harder they try to escape. Facing the camera, grandma gradually reveals her inner world, her lack of strength, regrets, fears and expectations. Grandma’s already over 80, yet still stands firm against destiny, in silence. Everything seems to be in vain. The only thing she can do is to try numb herself to the pain and just keep on getting by.
Director │ CAI Jie
Producer │ XING Beilie
“Why are we Living Buddhas?” This is a question that the two brothers ask each other many times, even though those around them never doubt them. A master has said they will regain a token from a previous life to prove who they are when they reach the age of 18. But before this point, they still need to find the answer and grow up by themselves. There is always a misty forest to walk through. For them, many questions exist concerning their relationship with each other, the boundary between Buddhist and secular life and, the ongoing change from nature to modern life, not to mention the questions about their mysterious identity and destiny. At 17 years old, in the midst of their adolescence, they returned to their hometown in, Litang County. At this time they reached the first decisions in their lives that differed: Nyima chose to practice Buddhism in a bigger temple, while Dawa chose to follow his heart, studying in a primary school. To be a Buddha or not, this is their question.
Director │ XU Wei-chao
Producer │ LEE Ning
This is a story about a elementary school football team in Shinjang and their football season. Han Chinese coach CHUNG Nan of Shihezi 11th Elementary School will lead an underdog team of Uyghur young footballers with a dim future. To start from Shihezi, they will embark upon a journey that changes their fates on their road to the championship.
Director │ ZHANG Nan
Producer │ ZHANG Yong
Three decades ago, thousands of farmers moved from the desert to the bank of Yellow River, and at the same time most of their local ballads, passed on for generations, were lost. Our protagonist, Ga-song, who has suffered from a stammer since childhood, learned many folk songs to treat his condition. While learning folk songs did not effectively cure his sickness, he eventually became fond of the folk music of his homeland.
For the last 7 years, he has stayed away from his home to make a living as a touring singer. Wandering through hundreds of cities, he has become more and more popular and was even invited to appear before the entire nation on the show, China’s Got Talent. But at a critical moment he decided to quit and return home. When he returned, there was nothing left; seeing that the rural life had vanished entirely, he now has to learn how to deal with his anger at how things have changed.
Director │Sally WU
Producer │Sally WU, S. Leo CHIANG
Why are tens of thousands of young women sent away from home to marry foreigners they barely know? Why are mothers across Asia abandoning their children in the middle of the night? If She Leaves examines the repercussions of international arranged marriages in Asia by following one Vietnamese migrant bride as she contemplates leaving her Taiwanese husband and their two daughters to escape mistreatment and seek a better future.
Director │ Kathy HUANG
Producer │ Debbie LUM
Guangzhou, China, manufacturing capital of the world, has attracted nearly 200,000 African migrants over the past decade. Their presence has led to a new social trend: marriages between African men and Chinese women. A Guangzhou Love Affair traces the love, heartache, and challenges of two Afro-Chinese couples. Through their taboo romances and determination to protect their families at all costs, they are at the forefront of a movement helping to forge a new, more inclusive China. Their stories not only hold a mirror to countries trying to meet the challenges of a multiracial society, but also serve as an inspiration to individuals everywhere fighting for the right to love freely beyond borders and color lines.
Director │ Tracy DONG
A director with a real Cultural Revolution complex, named YEH Jing, attempts to bring nine young actors back to the Cultural Revolution by taking them to a firearms factory in a village in Sichuan without the possibility of having any contact from the outside world – just like an anthropological experiment. These nine actors must wear clothes and listen to music from the period every day. When one of the actors asks for leave, a great struggle ensues. It would appear that these actors have gone through some quite astonishing changes during their time together.
Director, Producer │ Ben KANG
Dance on the Square depicts the changing dance styles in Chinese society from the Cultural Revolution up to this day. It traces the history of square dancing, popular in today’s China, from its origins as a form of loyalty dance during the Cultural Revolution.
The five main characters chosen for filming are as follows:
Mr. CHOU, who rebelled during Cultural Revolution and can still perform a handstand at the age of 70; Mr. LIU, the 73-year-old Chief Justice, who took part in the Sino-Indian War and fighting on the frontline; Mr. XUONG, who finds respite from caring his 105-year-old father through dancing in the square; Ms. YINN, who is now 60 years old but was a leader of the Red Guards back in the day; and Ms. CHEN, who is a 60-year-old professional dancer and received a large amount of unfair treatment during the Revolution.
Despite their diverse identities and experiences, they all went through the Cultural Revolution and are all participants and witnesses of the way that square dancing has developed. In this film, a connection between these characters is established through square dancing, the evolution of which provides a perfect example of the historical changes in China during the past forty years. Taking this angle, we focus on the changes in the mentality of contemporary Chinese people, leading ultimately to the interpretation of what lies at the center of this film: a change in spirit.
Director │ LAU Kek-Huat
Producer │ CHEN Jing-lian
They lived their lives captivated by a Malayan dream. Aiming for a better future for the country, they sacrificed their lives and families. But their stories were left untold, banned and buried for 60 years.
This is as story of an unknown man, an exiled army and the unraveling of an old melody, “Love In Malaya”. The story begins with a man’s portrait, which has been hung for more than 30 years in my old wooden house in Perak, Malaysia. It had long been a taboo for my family ever to mention this man, to ever to bring up his name or his past. It was only a few years ago, that I found out that this man was my grandpa, an MCP (Malaya Communist Party) soldier who had sacrificed his life during the Independence fight in 1949. For years, many young Malaysians like me grew up without the knowledge of true history, shadowed by a fear to find out more. We were mystified and clouded by biased history, subverted by the government, school and media. This film is about my search for my absent grandpa, told from the account of my family’s memories. With secrets hidden in the deep rainforest, waiting to unfold, this is but one of the many stories of beloved yet forgotten family members from this time.
Director │ Elvis LU
Producer │ Kay CHOU
In May 1996, Pastor Ya-hui YANG founded the Tong-Kwang Light House Presbyterian Church, the first church in Taiwan founded to specifically serve homosexual congregations. However, it’s creation also gave rise to violent criticism and attacks from the more traditional communions. Due to the various difficulties experienced in providing these services, Pastor YANG found herself dealing with an insurmountable amount of pressure, resulting in her suicide in May 2008, through inhaling the fumes caused by burning charcoal. In taking her own life she managed to create a place where homosexual Christians could find some respite and begin to rise. Her spirit has passed on, guiding her followers towards the revolution for their basic human rights.
Director, Producer │ Masamojo
Agen is going to have a baby. He is a gay man aged 40, who just got out of prison and has retreated into the mountains with his boyfriend. His desire is to quit the gay night club business, something which has brought him both wealth and danger. But to save money for the baby and their future, he must fight his last battle by opening another club. The film tells us about Agen’s life journey, his loves and fears, and about the gay underground world as he has witnessed it.
Director │ LIN Hao-shen, SHIH Yu-lun
When her oldest daughter Hao-ying was diagnosed with ADHD, HSIAO Hsian-yu came to realize that she too suffers from ADHD, explaining why she had felt so misunderstood over the past 30 years, and had led a life full of difficulty and frustration. She saw the isolation her daughter encountered at school and at home. She saw her denying her true self and taking medication to meet others’ expectations. Though her daughter’s feelings of inferiority and withdrawal echoed her own experiences in such a similar way, by being at Hao-ying’s side as she grew, leading her daughter to find confidence and self-worth, she managed to rediscover the life she had once lost.
Director │ FAN Jian
Producer │ XU Zitao, Leer Cheng
YU Xiu-hua, who has been described as the Emily DICKINSON of China, gained extreme popularity during the spring of 2015 when she became one of the the most renowned poets in China.She also suffers fromcerebral palsy.
She sees herself in this order; woman, farmer, poet. Her lot in life has forced her to suffer through more pain than many other people, but it is this destiny that has also pushed her to make the most of her god given talent. It is through this talent that she finds herself boosted up on to a pedestal and facing the limlight, but at this moment her family, her support, also starts to crumble around her. Can the poet stand up against the reality of life by herself?
Director │ Stephen Gurie WOO
Producer │ Alfred SUNG
This is a story about a century-long rise and fall of sewing business in Shanghai and Hong Kong. It is also about reuniting with a group of relatives as well as facing my own experiences during the worst time. A family-run sewing shop turned out to keep the most precious lesson for life, together with the footsteps of generations of Chinese as they decided whether to stay or to leave. It all started in 1995, when I was eighteen and found two old sewing shop receipts from the 50s.
Director│ PAN Zhi-qi
China has experienced a shift from a predominantly agricultural-based economy to a new industrial society. As a result, cities in China grew, more and more farmers migrate from rural area to large metropolises. This documentary follows Mr. SUE, Guo-qiang and Ya-ning, those who are seeking new life in the city. We embark with them on a life –changing journey, beginning with the anxiousness that embodies leaving one’s home to overcoming the struggles that come with assimilating into the fast-paced city life.
Director, Producer│SU Qing, Mina
Producer│ SU Qing, GUO Xiao-dong
This is a story about a group of children who are blind, deaf or mute: CAO Han-zi, a growing kid seeking answers to her endless questions; ZHANG Dan-tong, trained in Henan Opera since young in hope of changing her destiny through reality shows; LI Cong ,fights to be accepted by her grandma for her handicap; WANG Yi-wen, desires to produce and act in an Italian Opera. Can their wishes be fulfilled?
Director │ LIAO I-ling, CHU Po-ying
Producer │ LIAO I-ling
LI Yuan-chia was born in China during the turbulent period of WWII and became an orphan growing up in Taiwan. In order to get rid of the conservative frame of after-war feudal society of Asia, he went far away to the west to embrace the freedom of creation. He wandered a lot and created his artworks wherever he went. Finally he settled to build a museum for all by himself in an English village, where also became his home. Abiding by his will, his best friend Nick SAWYER has taken care of his works since he had passed away for 20 years. Now he is already aged and this museum might need to be sold in auction for paying tax.
Director │ Lola LIU
Producer │ Wolfgang BERGMANN
During the past 10 years, CHEN Si saved over 200 people from jumping to their deaths from the Yangtze Bridge in Nanjing. Together with those he has rescued, he takes a look at why they ended up on the bridge. The journey together to the individuals pasts, both in the city and in the country, and thus learn the deeper reasons that drove them to them to decide to commit suicide-reasons of a social nature, the underlying causes of which are found in the rapid transformation of Chinese society. We accompany these travels with the camera, thus creating a rare and nuanced image of the inside of China.
Director │ HUANG Yin-yu
Producer │ Tetsujiro YAMAGAMI
More than 800 immigrants from Taiwan and their descendants still live on the Yaeyama Islands of Okinawa. Originally recruited as farmers by the Japanese government, they witnessed the history of colonial Taiwan, the end of World War II, Okinawa under the US administration, and its return to Japan in 1972. They lived 30 years without nationality but eventually became naturalized. In Okinawa history, they were once referred to as “the stateless people”.
Director │ FEI You-ming、LIU Shuo
The film focuses on the Internet during a period of rapid transformation in China. Rising from obscurity, an ordinary girl suddenly makes the headlines of major news websites and becomes the center of attention of millions of people. The 25-year-old puts the rest of her life in the hands of netizens. She shows up in people’s life and helps realize their wishes. This incident breaks out of the Internet and attracts domestic and international media alike. Behind all this stands LI Er, the man who has been manipulating the event since its beginning. The film reveals how LI Er creates a series of sensational drama through the Internet and how he takes advantage of human desire to ignite public revelry. What is left after the revelry? Progress, or regress?
Director │ JUAN Jiang, Jeffery CHENG
Three young people of different occupations co-founded the first China Women Film Festival as a part-time project. All amateurs, they obtained international films through their unique means. They contacted as many curators of different film festivals as possible for experiences and supported the Festival out from their own pockets. Despite all the mistakes during the Festival, it was nonetheless charming for being truly unrefined. However, one could sense some subtle tells in the relationships between the three curators. With that, where would the CWFF go?
Director │ ZHANG Nan
Producer │ ZHANG Yong
ZHANG Nan’s My Dear Lines follows the journey of a young girl born and raised in a lower-class, family. She is gifted with the talent of drawing. She realizes that, she can make her own place in society through her talent, and not live by the one that was given to her. She sacrifices her whole life in order to achieve her goal.
Director, Producer │ Hau Man WAN
Hau Man WAN’s All About Myself gives us insight into one of humanity’s greatest complexities, identity. Hau Man’s documentary follows the life of a “born female” who identifies as a male. Along with facing an internal struggle with the inharmonious configuration of Hau Man’s soul and body, Hau Man also faces the exterior struggle of societal pressure. This film opens new avenues of thought: Is gender strictly defined by female or male? Or is there a possibility for more identities?
Director │ Brian YANG
Producer │ Jack CHANG
In the mid-90s to 2000s, scandals rocked Taiwanese baseball and its popularity waned. But as negative impact from these incidents subsided and the focus became more about the talented players, Taiwan proved it could compete internationally and the Major League teams started to notice by recruiting Taiwanese players. We will tell the story of baseball and its place in Taiwan through the eyes of players playing abroad and at home, officials, agents, fans, and other figureheads. We will examine how players train, follow the ups and downs of several players, and we will show how baseball is not just a sport in Taiwan, but a way of life.
Director │ WANG Wen-ming
Producer │ Eason WANG
At the source and the mouth of a river respectively lived two families with a life of joy and satisfaction. However, as climate change reduced glacier water, the surging herds of goats on the snowy mountain indicated the ecological burdens of the grasslands, while the magnificent desert implied the crisis of desertification. Worrying consequences were revealed within years. Will they meet more harsh challenges for survival?
Director │ Suzie MA
A love story centered around a Chinese private detective who has been chasing mistress and cheating husbands around the world for the last 20 years. It can also reflect Chinese views on love and marriage.
Director │ CHI Yueh-chun, Richard HSIAO
Producer │ TSAI Tsung-lung
As a detective, the director investigated and filmed a kidnap and murder case happened 18 years ago. As the truth was dug up during the filming process, what was once called true was later found to be counterfeited.
Director, Producer │ Larry CHAN
Producer │Edmen LEE, Panda CHAN, Chelsea NG
The opening of gambling right in Macau has brought great fortunes as well as social problems. In an ethos of injustice and distorted values, young people generally became indifferent to politics and kept their mouths shut. SOU Ka-hou, CHAO Teng-hei, and YANG Wan-ting were three youths who embarked on street politics, after losing legislative election. However, at the back of their burning youth was an enormous pressure from the society and their families. How do the citizens define them beyond their fighting? Heroes or rebels? The answer will be revealed in three years after the election.
Director │ MAK Chun Kit
Producer │ Cindy ZENG
Little people chase their dreams in China’s controversial dwarf theme park. We trace their pursuit of happiness in spite of the odds against them. The observational documentary traces the journeys of a few employees who have joined the theme park for different reasons. A change of heart, a secret escape, a struggle to find true love and a venture beyond the confines of“The Dwarf Empire”lead to vastly different experiences. Connected by a will to pursue their dreams and a life of happiness, these little people take their chances in an uncertain world.
Director │ GUO Hai-tao
Producer │ Joe BINI
Mr. FANG Yu-ling is a 65 year old Peking Opera master witnessed the peak and fall of the Peking Opera-the greatest classic performing art in Chinese theatre. Crushed by Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the social changes in modern China, the great tradition of passing on the art form from master to pupil is being lost. Now living in exile in New York and feeling his skill diminish with age, FANG Yu-ling staged an opera on June 24th, 2012. Though he knows his cast is amateurish, he uses all his skills and charisma’s to inspire them to commit to the performance. Even this rough approximation of the real opera makes him feel like a star again. He cannot help but put his heart and soul into it. Though he knows the world he was trained in as a boy will soon be lost, he fights with honor and integrity to fulfill his life-long mission to perform an opera in New York.
Director | Sean W.H KUNG
Mr. YANG had a working holiday in Australia, where he completely refused jobs on the farm. However, he had a dream about his grandfather’s pineapple fields on a train in Thailand. He found that the palate in his childhood memories was fading, just like that of his grandfather. Therefore, he decided to return to the fields, hoeing again, in the hope to once again savor that taste in his childhood. Organic agriculture is a tough and time-consuming business in Taiwan, especially when he and his father are the only laborers on the farm. Unexpectedly, a letter to the Taiwanese president changed it all.
Director │ Maso CHEN
Producer │WU Yu-wen
As a professor in the study of anatomy, one of the most difficult dilemmas is whether to support a loved one's wish to donate their body to a medical institution. Over the course of a semester-long anatomy class, we will look into the families of those who have donated their bodies, the teachers and students, and experiences how they face the conflict between death and the ownership of bodies.
Director │ HOU Zu-xin
Producer │ LIU Bin
Sixty-year-old HOU Mu-ren is one of China's first generation of rockers. After suffering a stroke in 2009, he lost the ability to speak for a time but not his passion for rock and roll.
Forty-year-old GAO Hu is the lead vocalist of Miserable Faith, a hardcore metalband from Beijing. After fame and success, he grabs his new album and begins his dreamed journey to Tibet.
Twenty-year-old LIANG Bo is the fresh-faced 2012 winner of The Voice of China. He is currently working on his highly anticipated debut album amidst intense media scrutiny.Rock guides them and gives them strength, regardless of age.
Director │ Ben KANG
Producer │WANG Xin
Sonam Darge has loved writing poetry since he was a child. He often imagines himself as the reincarnation of Tshangs-dbyangs-rgya-mtsho (also known as Tsangyang Gyatso, the sixth Dalai Lama) and wants to publish his own book of poetry. But then his younger brother passes away, and he gets rejected by the publisher. When religion fails to provide him with a sufficient sense of belonging, does this Lama -- a poet so colored by romanticism -- overcome his sense of inferiority with wisdom, and find the ability to seek out his soul within the world of poetry?
Director │ Kite CHEN
Father left a tremendous amount of things after he passed away. The bits and pieces of the memories of him vanish little by little as items being tossed away one after another. Afraid of losing the memories, the daughter picks up her camera and attempts to create a dialogue with the deceased father through items, documents he left behind, and words of people he once knew.
Director │Connie Yan-wai LO
Consultant │ IP Hon-ming
The Hong Kong 1967 Leftist Riots is considered as a historical watershed for Hong Kong. However, the three parties (China, Britain and Hong Kong) have remained so silent and reluctant to revisit this historical episode. As all three parties are unwilling to face the lessons from history and as we can see that lots of political frustrations and pressures are adding up lately in our community, can Hong Kong hide away from these historical questions any longer?
Director, Producer │TSAI Yi-feng
Zhi-ming's father's boat was seized and confiscated overseas. The family suddenly fell into economic difficulty. The father had no choice but to retire early and return home to find job and care for his grandchildren. To comfort his father, Zhi-ming wants to craft a miniature fishing boat as a present. Meanwhile, Zhi-ming's younger brother, Zhi-mao, who wants to venture into the fishing industry, also returns home to investigate what happened. He talks to many fishing boat captains in Xiaoliuqiu and learns that what happened to his father is a common experience for almost all fishermen from the island. If a boat has been seized and confiscated, the fishermen would say the boat has been "taken away". A boat usually worths millions of Taiwanese dollars; once it's seized and confiscated, the fishermen would be left with nothing. Some captains hustle to recover the loss, but for Zhi- ming's father, the reality of once having a boat has sunk and been buried at the bottom of his memories.
Director │ Norbert SHIEH
Producer │ KIM Ki-jin
PRESERVES observes agriculture's effects on individuals in Taiwan through the process of growing and harvesting suan cai over the course of one season. The film reveals a disappearing lifestyle and landscape through intimate vignettes that emerge from lives that revolve around the industry. As this nomadic crop meets further difficulties of emerging farming and land regulations, the uncertainty of future seasons quickly and inevitably becomes clear to those involved in its production.
Director │Nicola CONTINI
Producer │ Alessandro CARROLI
Emilia and Angiolo decided to travel the route followed by thousands of Chinese workers towards Italy in the opposite direction: they emigrated to China in order to make up for the bankruptcy of their family business in Tuscany. After having spent 8 years in the Far East and approaching their seventies, Mr. and Mrs. Fattori have another choice to make, in contrast with their son and daughters: where should they build the future of their family?
Director │LIANG Mai
Producer │ DAI Nian-wen
It's a story about young people at the prime of their youth; about their often rousing or confused relationship to life, death, emotions, society, and the like; and about how they judge and choose their path. Amidst emotional turmoil, they struggle with loneliness. Expected personality traits are merely a disguise; when the mask comes off, this impulse-driven society can really kill someone!
Director │ ZHANG Zan-bo
A highway under construction is going to cut across an ordinary and quiet village in Xiangxi, Hunan Province. Lots of road workers flooded into the village from other places. Over three years, they earned their living through hard working. Meanwhile, the village and the local people are confronted by the fate of being changed.
Director │ K.M. LO
Producer │ WU Chi-ying
CHICOLATE CITY is the nickname of African peddlers’ settlement in Guangzhou. It’s a story about the social pressure and issues caused by illegal African immigration in China. This film analyzes the reaction of Chinese and the golden dream of illegal African immigration, interprets the joys and sorrows in life from both sides, and how to keep a tolerant and open attitude to accept the impact of multicultural.
Director │ FU Yue
Producer │ CHANG Da-jung
It's a story about how a Chinese girl, CAI Bo-yi. She goes to school in Taiwan, breaks through the external constraints and internal self-censorship from her country, and searches for true freedom. CAI grew up in a speech-constrained state and looks forward to the complete freedom. She enjoys the right of being against the government in Taiwan, but she has to walk in jeopardy because of the double pressure from the mainland and the little island. This smart girl has to find a perfect excuse.
Director │LEE Li-shao
In the name of the "State Mine Exercise", the Thai-Burmese guerrilla withdrew to Taiwan in 1961. They were sent to reclaim a barren area at the junction of Kaohsiung and Pingtung counties. The history of this period, hitherto excluded from Taiwan's national memory, is gradually revealed through the memories of these former child soldiers even as these veterans slowly wither away in this small southern region of the country.
Director │DING Yi, J.P. SNIADECKI
In 2006, I followed my mom back to the Great Northern Wilderness where she left near 30 years ago. My mother, born in 1949, and I, born in 1978, have had the similar passionate ideal but faced the disparate transformations of Cultural Revolution and after the Reform And Open. Just like any place in China, the Great Northern Wilderness is transforming radically. The students my mother taught then became the human test field of the reformation. The tension derived from the growing of poverty gap leads to a homicide ultimately.
Director │ Vincent TSAI
Producer │ Frances LU
An anti-nuclear youth activist returns home, a place surrounded by nuclear power plants, to observe from a short distance Captain Okela, a controversial nuclear power opposition figure from the last generation. Through Captain Okela's present-day leadership of anti-nuclear activities among local residents, and his colorful and legendary past as a smuggling kingpin and community leader, the youth is searching for the truth behind the anti- nuclear movement.
Director │ XIE Xiu-yuan
Ten years ago, the uncle ZHANG Gao-ping was at the emerging stage of his career and the nephew was about to get married. Yet, at that time, accident happened. One day, the two guys gave a young woman a ride who got raped and killed later that day. Somehow they were put into prison just because of the ride. It was clearly a miscarriage of justice. Now the injustice has been righted and they settle back to homeland. However, can the uncle and nephew get back to their normal life after journalists?
Director │ WU Jian-xin
Producer │ Hanah HSU
"The rain may enter, the storm may enter, but the King of England cannot enter," goes the Western saying. This common idea of civil society is only a fairy tale to people in China. To this day, Chinese-style tragedies of housing demolition and relocation are continually being enacted. This film tells the story of how, in a southern city noted for its fierce popular pride, several common citizens facing demolition of their homes are resisting by legal means. Their slogan is "Arm ourselves with law and help the government to correct its wrongs." On the surface, this appears to be an ants-vs.-elephants battle of relocatees against government and developers. In actuality, this is a contest between the sprouts of civil consciousness and a deeply entrenched "ant- izen" mentality.
In 2007, the government began to push the "Hong Kong Street Project" in the name of renewing the Old City. By now, most citizen residences within the project's enclosed area have been demolished, and only a small number of households still refuse to move. Among them the most determined are Ah Zhi, Ah Mei, Hong Jie and Pepper. In 2011, Gao Lao appeared on the scene to share his rights-protection experience and teach the basics of law. With Gao Lao's free-of-charge assistance, Ah Zhi and the rest have been quite effective at resisting demolition and protecting their rights according to the law. However, the course of forcible demolition is by now irreversible. The small group of holdouts have two choices: give in or try matching points of law with the government in a government courtroom.
Director │ James SU
Producer │ Magnolia YU
A group of young Chinese rockers highly influenced by western culture since the beginning of 21st century that has entered their prime. They are struggling to find a way out of the cliche between art and survival. With music as a vehicle, they are pondering and exploring more deeply into their lives, relationships and mythology. This film will reveal the hopes and dreams of three iconic rock musicians, their life search, and the utopia in each of their minds.
Director │ Mike SHANG
Producer │ Cindy Xin ZENG
In order to eat safe food, Ms. ZHANG became a lower class farmer from an upper class diplomat. For the past thirteen years, with the Chinese conventional wisdom, she has explored the methods of sustainable organic farming. Although the cost is beyond imagination, she always keeps faith and fight against the mainstream values with individual efforts. How far can she go after all?
Director │ ZHOU Yu
Producer │ SUN Meng
This film tells the story of YANG Yong, the explorer, and his non- governmental scientific survey team's two-month expedition to the glaciers at Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. There, rifts, conflicts and crisis threaten the relationship between man and nature, and relationships amongst the team members. The film will also expore the current state of the glaciers at Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, a place that has been honored as the world's third pole.
Director │ Angel SU
YANG, a.k.a "Woody Daddy" wants to build a Tang Dynasty wooden house, which is a two-story building constructed without steel or nails, but only mortise and tenon joint. He has already taken eight years and spent 140 thousand US dollars to make this dream come true. His family seems indifferent and doubtful of YANG's dream, but ultimately begins to understand and support his work. Can YANG harness the ancient technique to complete his home?
Director │ Lora Yan CHEN
My Classmates: the New Wave of Chinese Cinema is my insider's view of these filmmakers' formative experiences during China's Tumultuous Cultural Revolution, our life at the Beijing Film Academy from 1978 to 1982, and their film careers from 1982 to the present. Today they are the backbone of Chinese Cinema.
Before 1978, most of my classmates were peasants, workers, and soldiers. They were shaped by the Cultural Revolution, then they revolutionized Chinese cinema with their films: Yellow Earth, Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, Farewell My Concubine and Hero. While I was in America they became world famous.
Their work molded modern China's international image, and the face China sees when it looks in the mirror. Who are these artists and what do their lives reveal about the world's emerging superpower? The film through this group of filmmakers' lives reveals 30 years of China's social, political, and economic change.
Director │ HAN Yi
A blind man, CAO Shengkang, sets out to travel and "see" the world. Being discriminated since he was little, he finally finds happiness and self confidence when traveling. He has promised himself he's going to travel 3 to 6 countries each year. But this dream is against the wish of the family, who needs him to make money to pay for his daughter's basic living and education, his younger brother's tuition, and the family debt. Their village home starts sinking this year due to the illegal mining in the area. They have to move. Will CAO ignore the fanatical needs of the family? Or will he have to give up his dream?
Director │ WANG Zhe
Early 2012, in the JIANG Family Village in Kaihwa County, Zhejiang Province, China, nine elder members decided to refurbish the "JIANG's Family Hall." They hired an experienced carpenter, WANG, from another village, who would teach them on how to build a hall. The ten elders soon started cutting sturdy wood in the mountains and bring them down to the village to use them a beam.
All of the ten elderly are grandpas. Their grandchildren's parents have all gone to the cities for work; only before Chinese New Year would they return home. Construction work has not been consistent, as seasonal chores still need to be done in fields. But, as soon as they are finished with fieldwork, the elderly continue refurbishing the hall.
Director │ WU Shwu-mey
Producer │ Felice C.P. WANG
This film documents eleven-year-old Chen-chen who left his home in Zhengzhou, China to study in an experimental junior high school, which adopts the inclusive model, in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Chen-chen is a student with learning disabilities and behavioural problems. In this documentary, we see not only how Chen-chen makes progress in a new school but also how differently the students are treated in different cultural environments. Told from Chen-chen's point of view, the film reveals his life and learning progress in Taiwan, and from there we begin to understand the interaction, integration, and conflicts amongst "different" children.
Director, Producer │ Jane Hui WANG
Producer │ZHANG Jun
Continuing the story where other documentaries left off, after the people have been relocated and have had to re-build their lives, Last Harvest follows the remarkable journey of an elderly Chinese farming couple as they relocate in order to accommodate the government's mammoth and highly controversial South-to-North Water Diversion (SNWD) project, the largest of its kind in the world. The Last Harvest offers an intimate and direct experience of the collisions between traditional culture and urbanization/ modernization, between individuals and society, shared by millions in China and around the world.
Director │ HUANG Hui-zhen
This is a story about my mother. While she was born into a traditional agricultural society, she is not traditional at all. She is a lesbian and a Taoist priest that leads "Din Tao" parades at funerals. She enjoys smoking, playing poker cards, and collecting pictures of scantily dressed women printed on betel nut boxes.
When I was seven years old, I found out that my mother is attracted to women. Now my seven-year-old niece has also asked, "Auntie, is grandma a boy or a girl?"
My answer is so long that I decided to make a documentary for my niece.
Note: According to folk religion (mostly based on Taoism) in Taiwan, people turn into ghosts when they die. The deceased good people will be taken to the Pure Land of the Buddha Amitabha in the West, while villains will be condemned to hell and tried. The "Kan Ong" singing-dance parade, a kind of "small play" in traditional Chinese Opera, is performed at funerals. At funerals, "red-head priests" would use religious instruments to evoke the gods, who would then lead the deceased through the inferno to the Pure Land.
Director │ XIE Xiu-yuan
Around ten-years-old Granny GU cut a piece of her own flesh to help cure her mom. Now at the age of 102, she lives at the senior center. Her only daughter lives far away in Suzhou. With rarely any visitors, Granny GU is sad when she sees other grannies' enjoying visits with their relatives.
When she was younger, Granny GU saved the lives of the Chinese from Japanese invaders and gangsters, and later became a social worker in the community office. In order to attractattention, Granny GU likes to defend for justice in the senior center. Granny CHEN is her sidekick, while Granny CAO, 103, as her opponenthas become her nemesis...
Director │Vincent DU
This is about an alternative upbringing in China. In a music school with its headquarters in Tianjin, China, three children, Yaohan, Qingjian and Deqi, and their families have dreams and aspirations for fame and gain by training themselves to become superstars.
Director │ Adiong LU
Producer │ CHANG Chen-ying
The Dream in the Mirror is about a bamboo shoot salter from a traditional market. She is also a "self-portrait artist" whose works were collected by the National Museum of Fine Art. Her name is LIU Yi-lan. Through her, you see a typical image of a "Taiwanese female from the old era." LIU lived in poverty, grew up without parents. She began working at a young age, got married when she was 18, raised children, and began self-discovery and self-improvement. However, this is not a story about inspirations. This is a mysterious journey told through LIU's self-portraits. Time and again, LIU stands in front of the mirror searching for meanings and definitions as she navigates between her soul and flesh. Her body is the battlefield.
Director │CHEN Jing-lian
Producer │LAU Kek-huat
A small and humble kitchen serves as a shelter for three repenting souls. Hao, Gui and Xia were once teen gangsters. They've stumbled down some dark paths filled with repeat imprisonments, forsaken families, and gang fights end in deaths. But now they are determined to change, to rehabilitate, and to embark on a new beginning in the small kitchen of a restaurant called "Blue Mark."
Faced with challenges and financial pressures, and without family support, can they withstand the temptations of the previous gangster lifestyle and give themselves a second lease on life?
Director │LAM Wai-tung
Photographer │ LEUNG Yau-cheong
The story of Mr. TENG's family unfolds with a visit by Miss HO, a caring social worker from Caritas of Hong Kong. It's a story about new migrants from Mainland China and their rooftop residency. As blue-collar laborers, Mr. TENG and his family contribute greatly to the infrastructure of Hong Kong with their hard work. However, like most Hong Kong people, Mr. TENG is unable to afford the skyrocketing high rent of private housing, Cheap and cramped rooftop housing becomes their only option. Recently, Mr. TENG and his wife finally received approval for public housing. However, other problems force them to live apart from their son, Bo, who also struggles with housing issues.
Director │ ZHAO Qing
Weifang remained single for more than a decade in order to wait for the love of her life Shufeng. Their marriage was circumstantial yet predestined. Eight years ago Weifeng was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. She doesn't remember anyone except Shufeng. Although she doesn't remember anything, she knows that Shufeng is the one she'll spend the rest of her life with. For these two no loss of memory can obliterate their love for each other.
But now, eighty-six-year-old Shufeng must face the realities of finding a home to take care of Weifang.
Director │ YANG Jian-jun
The Starfish Project is about the life of YUAN Quan, a life coach. Through rock climbing, parkour, martial art, street boxing, YUAN explores the meaning and philosophy of life. He organizes many public welfare activities including giving away candy, dressing up as Santa Claus, the "Wing Project" and "Starfish Project." YUAN helps a beggar, who dreams of becoming a writer, with monthly living expenses in order that the beggar can begin to be self sufficient, and to live with dignity. YUAN also wants to nurture the beggar to be a life coach.
Director │ ZENG Xi
Photographer │ ZHOU Yang
Three kilometers north of the National Stadium in Beijing is the "Waste City," populated by more than 30,000 migrants from Henan Province. Here, the poor search for sellable waste in garbage dumps, while the rich drive around in BMWs. With its own schools, hotels and people from different social classes, Waste City functions as a microcosm existing in isolation from the rest of China. Among Waste City's residents are 10-year-old WANG Qin and her sister, born and raised here, and the LIU family who collects and sells discarded wood for a living. The government announced that Waste City would be demolished in 2012, leaving the residents with no options. WANG Qin and her sister will have to go back to Henan for schooling, while LIU desperately looks for a new home.
Director, Producer │Hao WU
The film chronicles the staging of the musical Fame by the graduating class of China's top drama academy, in China's first official collaboration with Broadway. It focuses on two students of different personalities and family backgrounds, competing for the A-cast while preparing to enter China's murky world of showbiz. Confronting the unique challenges for Chinese youth today, the students must forge their own path to fame.
Director │ XU Hui-jing
Producer │ Warren CHIEN
ZHANG Haijia was given up at birth by his parents to another family due to the "one-child" policy. Even with all his efforts, as an adult, ZHANG was unable to achieve much in the big city. Additionally, his failied marriage from two years ago is the source of disappointment for both sets of his parents. Desperate for love, ZHANG intends to find love through work as a wedding host.
In his spare time, ZHANG writes poems, practices self- improvement, studies Buddhism, and seeks a world full of love and harmony. But the reality is he's unable to find a society that will embrace him.
Two years later a woman with child enters his life, she later becomes pregnant with ZHANG's child. Both of their parents disapprove of their marriage. And ZHANG's wedding host business seems to also be on the rocks. ZHANG just can't seem to get a break.
Director │ MA Zhan-dong
Producer │ Sunny SUN
In 2005, LEE Si-mei was harvesting the last season of opium poppy with her children in the field. Since poppy was banned in Wa State the livelihoods of people who have lived on the crops for generations have been seriously threatened. Unlike LEE, Grandma CHEN came to Wa State from China when she was a young girl. She buys and sells opium for living. Ever since she arrived in Wa State she has never gone back to China as she lost her citizenship. They are people who lost their nations and nationalities; they are forgotten and yet regarded guilty for the global drug trade.
Three years had passed since poppy was banned. LEE's daughter has gone to work as a maid in an official's home leaving a young daughter who was born out of the wedlock. LEE's second son was sent to prison for drug abuse and her youngest son began to take drugs as soon as he reached adulthood. Apart from that, nothing has changed in LEE's family.
The conflict between Burma and Kokang in 2009 heightened the tension in the region. Wa State which desperately wants to be recognized by the Chinese Government has no choice but relies on the paramilitary to defend itself. Neither the state nor its people know what awaits them in the future. Wa State has promised the world to crack down on opium production however it doesn't get the support it needs from the international community. As a result, Wa State is facing the cruel reality and the worsening humanity crisis.
Director │LEE Ya-ling
Cinematographer │ KUO Fu-cheng
A director with the Tourette syndrome meets a group of people from different age group and social status who have Tourette syndrome. They share similar but different life experiences. They stick together and make up their mind that they will find their own way out without relying on the medicine.
Director │Wuna WU
Producer │Ging LEE
An ordinary working mother, Wanda, has a whimsical idea – she wants to take her child to work! Beginning with fighting for her rights in her work place, she goes on to looking into the laws and regulations. She then comes to the conclusion that this is not a child-friendly society; mothers are expected to either stay at home or leave their children in the kindergartens when they choose to work.
In order to realize her "fantasy", Wanda embarks on an adventure in which she is confronted with countless difficulties. She becomes a founder of a school, persuades businesses to be more child-friendly and to participate in a documentary in the hope of promoting the idea. Being a mother makes a woman strong and determined. The journey begins with a mother's wish. Many businesses have gone through a huge amount of difficulties when they set up the kindergartens for their employees. Will their experiences make see how much the lack of support from the Government and society has contributed to the low birth rate today?
Director, Producer │Rosie DRANSFELD
Producer │ Fran YANOR, Fanfan ZHUANG
Fishing captain MIAO Hong-ju knows first-hand what scientist has been warning for decades – the world oceans are emptying. In China, the fist crisis is more evident than elsewhere. Rapid industrialization and overpopulation have exhausted surrounding seas. Cinema verite POV storytelling will offer an intimate glimpse of one man's struggle to survive a global catastrophe.
Director │ K.M. LO
Producer │ Jean-Philippe URY-PETESCH
K.M. LO consolidates his experience as tech-nomad, filmmaker, trainer into mobile cinema/training workshop on a tuk tuk. Going to developing countries to use his unique Chinese way of cinema workshop to motivate and train young folks to make film that becomes a "therapy course" to heal them from the hardship in life. Night time it's an open air cinema for cultural event and entertainment. Day time, a training center to make Hong Kong style action/low tech sci-fi film and documentary about their life with teenagers/kids.
The reason behind the concept is simple, kids have been living in such environment for long time, they have enough of hardship and there's no motivation for them to do or learn something to improve themselves. Instead of just making a documentary alone, they also create self-generated entertainment contents. Using a Hong Kong model of guerrilla film making technique to enable them to become a story teller.
"Deal with hardship in life with fun."
Director │ CHANG Ta-chung
Producer │ Kate TSAI
This is a story about how an ultramarathon champion whose legs have been amputated get back on her feet, literally and metaphorically. In 2008, CHIU Shu-jung, a Taiwanese ultramarathon runner finished an 1150-kilometre in eighteen days in France. However she lost her legs due to a serious bacterial infection. It has been three years since she began her physiotherapy. The tremendous amount of effort she puts in enables her not only to go back to work but finish a marathon on the tricycle. CHIU's husband is her first marathon coach. After she lost her legs, he feels guilty about initiating her into running.
But CHIU thinks that it's her fault that her legs are amputated and this has disrupted their lives as family. In order to make up for their mistakes, they keep each other company all the time during the past three years. CHIU gradually gets her independence back and re-joins the runners' community. By this time the couple has gained a better understanding of life.
Director │ WANG Guo-qing
This is a film to reflect the emotional, marital and existential concerns of young adults in contemporary China. Pressures that rooted in the failed process of education reform and social reform, including housing, employment and medical system, all fell right on the shoulder of everyone, causing drastic changes in our emotional and mental world. Especially for young adults, they are left in a very awkward position, not being able to find a job, buy a house, or even a romantic relationship. Marriage is the one that they find most terrifying to get into. Young people are said to be the future hopes of a society, but for those living in contemporary China, do they have the strength to support a future of uncertainty?
Director │ GU Ren-quan
Producer │ Rene SEEGERS
From 1958 to 1962 China suffered a famine that was hidden to the world. Chairman MAO's Great Leap Forward in development turned into a "Men-made Hell" for China's countryside.
Director │ Andrew LONE
Producer │ Zita ZHONG
The meaning of "Snooker" is to create obstacles in the aim of stopping others from succeeding, but snooker game may help people to get over obstacles. This film is an educational observation on forming humanity, exploring talents and the pursuit of success in modern society. Tong (14 yrs from Shenzhen) and Dong (13yrs from Hong Kong) are considered to be the next DING Jun-hui or Marco FU who are the top Chinese snooker players in the world. Tong has dropped from school, apprenticing to Uncle ZHONG who is considered as the "Godfather" of snooker in China. But Dong cannot quit school because it is illegal in Hong Kong. As the National Youth Snooker Competition draws near, how are the two talents to prepare their battle?
Director │ Alice HO
Producer │ Alice HO, HSIEH Chun-yi
Farming Luxuries illustrates the family life in modern China. WANG is a mink fur farmer from rural China struggling to maintain his business and his broken family, which was severed with the suicide of his only child. This film follows WANG's family and their effort to assimilate to life without their son.
Director, Producer │ HO Chao-ti
The social worker, Paul, was a hooligan himself when he was young. He wants to help the young aboriginals who had broken the law get away from crimes and start their lives afresh.
These young people didn't want to stay in education after they dropped out of the senior high school, but they didn't find themselves any jobs either. Paul helps some of them get apprenticeships at a funeral parlour; they begin with washing the bodies. Some of them have got jobs at the local guest houses.
These young people all come from deprived backgrounds. They desperately want to make money; the more the better. Therefore joining a criminal gang or stealing seems to be the quickest way to get what they want. Paul is trying his best to move these young men away from their old lives and to put them back on the right track, but it is not easy. Will Paul succeed? How much hardship does a young person have to endure before his life gets better?
Director │Meta HONG, Steffi HSIEH
This film shows the real life in Hua Yu, meaning "Flower Islet" literally, following the shooting of a TV program. When we shot the program "The World through a Camera Lens," we as the production team, got involved in the life of local students. With the support from the local school, we provided cameras and designed a series of activities. We were also able to invite along a photographer/reporter from reuters as the teacher. During this short period, the project tried to find out how the children on the island viewed the world through the lens of a camera. However, is what we showed on TV really how they think of this world? What is the life like after the production team left the island?
Director │ WANG Miao
This project follows an American private high school admissions officer and three Chinese students on their journeys of cultural and educational exchanges across the two sides of the Pacific. The students forgo the Chinese college entrance exam to study abroad in the US, but how will their hopes and dreams evolve after they parachute into a small town in Maine?
Director │GUAN Sheng-sheng
Producer │Alexis MESTRE
This 90-minute film records 17 different segments of a day, which portrays one typical day in Sun Village, and at the same time, reflects the 17 years some children spent there. These segments are made-up scenarios based on our long-term observation on and understanding of the village life. Despite of this intervention, the operated scenes are to present the seemingly obscure and yet caring love, which is hardly known to the audience.
Director │ WANG Wen-ming
Producer │ WANG Yi-fei
HE Fang-fei is among one of the children in Minqin who lost their homes and their school as "little environmental refugees." Their living conditions are worrisome due to desertification and drought. The children are fighting for their survival. The expectations from their elders, and the futures of the families are the burden for them to carry. Although the children were destined to dream about the future, but they are lost deep in their minds. Since they were born, the degrading environment nightmare passing through generations was already their waiting for them to be trapped in.
Director │Albert HUANG
This is a story of a family resisting formal school education system, and let their children home-schooling with the parents.
Currently, most of our education happened in schools, following standard dogma and content, and evaluate students by tons of examinations. In recent years, due to the constantly variance of the education policies, students, even school teachers can't get a whole picture of our education system, but very few of them try challenging the social system.
To study independently at home can avoid the rigid disciplines of school education system, but in this self-learning process, the lack of the team interaction and communication of social skills is an obvious missing. The related legal system needed to be established, this documentary is trying to find out the the obscurely circumstances of self-learning.
Director │ Isabelle MAYOR
Producer │ Jan VASAK
In Hong Kong, each square meter is optimised. A busy street during the day will turn into a shopping centre at night. In Yau Ma Tei, roads are closed to welcome a wholesale market of fruits and vegetables. In Central, at 5:00 am, thousands of delivery persons sort the newspapers that will be distributed daily. Space recycles itself. Mirado Mansions functions as a vertical, energy- saving city. Textile factories cohabit with hotels, internet cafés, apartments, and restaurants. Human beings live, work, and trade under the same roof.
Symbols of the soul and identity of Hong Kong, craftsmen and street workers transform the thousand streets that line the city into social places, thanks to their little customized shops called "booths". We will follow a shoemaker, a tarpaulin vendor, a house-cook, into the privacy of their habitat. We will dive into the lives of their families who experience this density on a daily basis.
Mr. HO, the umbrella seller, has worked for more than 50 years in the same street while young Ricky just opened a noodle restaurant in a minuscule space between two skyscrapers. These small entrepreneurs manage to take advantage of the density by seizing, in an uncanny, creative or original way, each and every corner of Hong Kong, a city where no square meter is wasted.
Director │ LI Xiao-feng
Producer │ JIA Kai
The "Red Culture" and "Red Songs" are making a comeback in China. LIU, who has been travelling all over China advocating the spirit of LEI Feng and the establishment of an international communist university strikes a humorous note in the chorus.
LIU is the Don Quixote of China who has devoted himself totally to advocating the spirit of LEI Feng. LIU is a fighter with an iron will who refused to give up his belief even when he was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. LIU is a spirit detector, a walking medium, a guinea pig trapped in a speaker. LIU is the soulmate of the mad, the hero of the poor and the target of the local police.
LIU always lives in the past. He has been travelling all over the place searching for his comrades and raising money for a copycat international communist university in the hope of solving young people's doubt about faith.
This is a tragicomedy about fate, faith and education. We began filming in March 2007. We have established a long-term relationship with the protagonist. The film reveals the changes in people's lives and the spirit of times against their historical backgrounds.
Director │YU Xun
Producer │Daniel CROSS
On a street set to face redevelopment, Mr. KOU is tempted by the promising displacement offer, while reluctant to let go of the life he has in the neighborhood. Confronted with the old age and a troubled son, Mr. Kou is struggling to preserve the last bits of joy and dignity he has left.
Director │Andrew LONG
Producer │ HAO Zhi-qiang
This is a story about youth and choice. This documentary observes and follows a group of Ürümqi parkour boys who were young, passionate, and free. It is hoped that, through our project, more would understand Xinjiang and the lives, sentiments, and dilemmas of its youth.
Director │ WANG Yang
This project aims to review the past of the workers and their families of the textile city, while documenting their lives at present. In the meantime, the contrasts between private and public spaces are studied, and questions on the relations between individualism and collectivism are proposed. We do not intend to gossip about the sorrows and pains of the interviewees. Rather, we are only profoundly interested in how they deal with such experiences in life, as well as the “history” of these individuals and their families. Such personal angles, long ignored in China, will be manifested in this project.
Director │ WANG Li-bo
As the longest river in China, the Yangtze River has been traditionally known as the “Golden Waterway,” but flooding along its banks has also been a chronic and daunting challenge. Built on the Yangtze River and billed as the world’s largest hydropower project, the Three Gorges Dam has attracted both scrutiny and controversy ever since its proposal. After decades of research, assessment, and controversies, as well as over 10 years of construction, the Three Gorges Dam has finally become a reality.
Through interviews with experts and high-level participants who objected to the Project, the documentary Three Gorges re-presents the debate, the controversy, the decision-making process, and the relationship between various interest groups behind the Project. The film compares the official feasibility assessment report, prepared prior to the construction, and the issues that arose after the construction (geological disasters, sedimentation problems, environmental pollution, impact on river traffic, ecological damage, forced migration, etc.) by visiting numerous sites along the reservoir. The use of the Construction Fund was also questioned. Ultimatelly, the filmmakers sought to uncover the truth behind the awe-inspiring exterior of the Three Gorges Dam.
Director │ SHEN Xiao-min
Producer │Andrew LONG
Our main character Mr. WANG, 58, an old man who is still mentally living in the MAO era, and that has devoted his life to sculpting Chairman MAO, accidentally fells into the contemporary art market turmoil and becomes a political-pop artist. In order to maintain his activity under new international market rules he has to adapt his style, representing MAO in an eccentric way. Mr. WANG now has a crazy project: sculpting a 100-meter high MAO statue.
Director │ Cecilia HO
Producer │Philip YUNG
Rose who missed the chimes of the church bells during her days in the orphanage. Bin who decided to come off drugs and begin to work in order to send money home. Rong-sheng who successfully became clean desperately seeking his daughter’s understanding. Rose, Bin and Rong-sheng are the protagonists of Left Them Behind, a documentary I made three years ago about drug users. In Left Them Behind, they gave us the detailed accounts of their stories. Three years later, how are they leading their lives? Are they getting closer to their goals? Are they getting closer to their true selves? Dope and Hope (dope referring to drug users) is a sequel to Left Them Behind which serves a witness to the lives of drug users and our concerns and indifference to this issue.
Director │ KUO Chen-ti, KO Neng-yuan
Producer │ Patrick HUANG
The global demand for the world’s tuna won’t be met possible without a group of fishermen from Taiwan. A Fishing Master could earn as much as $2 million for a 3-year fishing trip. This modern The Old Man and The Sea is about a 70-year-old veteran Fishing Master taking his last trip to the Pacific Ocean before retiring. With the threat from the climate change and environmental activists, can his last odyssey succeed? Can his son inherit his 1,500-ton boat?
Director │Jasmine Ching-hui LEE
Producer │ Mickey CHEN
A group of elderly people and foreign migrant workers from Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia live together in a nursing home in Taipei. This film is a portrayal of the relationships between the migrant workers, the elderly residents in the home, their family, the employer and the employment agents. The nursing home is a place where everyone misses his loved ones. Driven by financial needs, the migrant workers come to Taiwan to look after other people’s family. Both the elderly residents and the migrant workers suffer from homesickness. The film also focuses on the migrant workers who are mothers and the price they pay for their dreams and love.
Director │ Vivien Hui-mei CHEN
Producer │ Roger Chi-huan CHUANG
Inky Soul is a self-discovery journey exploring the true meaning of human’s ego. The story line starts from two Taiwan contemporary tattoo artists who devote themselves to create a brand-new aesthetics of tattoo art. Meanwhile, through tracing back to the origins of aboriginal Atayal disappearing traditions, the film intends to collect the missing puzzle of Taiwan tattoo history.
Director │ SHEN Ko-shang, LU Yun-chi
Producer │ HUNG Tin-yi
In Chinese communities, it is common practice taking sets of “memorial wedding photos” prior to marriage. Almost every would-be newlywed does so, and they always spend handsome money on it because marriage is more than important in life. The wedding photography industry, therefore, is surprisingly lucrative. In Taiwan, everyone knows the wedding sector to be thriving. The wedding market generates more than NT$10.5 billion per year in Taiwan, and the one in China is even more lucrative.
Memorial wedding photography shows people’s love and dedication to one another. Based on the concept of happiness, the unique Chinese customs and the most truthful human emotion are noted down in the memorial photos. However, behind the photos, there may be long-lasting true love, embarrassment after divorce, quarrels between lovers, or a heart-breaking past.
Marriage is significant to the Chinese, and memorial wedding photography is unique practice in the world. With this project, we hope to delve into the industry and understand how Chinese people define themselves and happiness.
Director | YEYun
This documentary project plans to interact with two groups of children of same age but of different social and economic backgrounds. These two groups of children will answer 10 questions bestowed by the production team. Through the questions and answers, the camera will show the life of these groups of children. The similarities and differences between them, their life in school, in families, their relationship with parents, their anxieties and dreams.
By tracing the lives of two groups of children, this documentary indeed intends to record the adult’s world, the world which educates and influences upon these children. The fact that these children were born at the turn of the century, has further significance. Their growing up experience indicates two future directions of current Chinese society.
Director │CHANG Ta-chung
Producer │ SHENG Ru-uing
Amid the devastation of typhoon Morakot and the impact of global warming, the documentary looks at the story of an elementary school hidden deep in the mountains of southern Taiwan, and seeks to identify a crisis faced by all humans in the first decade of the 21th century, and how it is responded to. Filming began after the 88 Taiwan Flood subsided, and the focus shifted gradually from the domestic issue of village relocation to a discussion of mutually beneficial co-existence between human and nature. Typhoon and flood have been a constant in the history of Taiwan, but similar disasters can be found all around the globe. It is the lessons of living in harmony with these natural calamities that are most valuable.
Director │TSAI Tsung-lung, Richard HSIAO
Producer │ Relax CHI
While iPhone and HTC smart-phones are making huge profits for Apple and HTC, the news of redundancies, strikes and series of workers’ suicides are heard from the plants which supply Apple and HTC. Are they the sweatshops in the high- technology industry? Or are there complicated stories behind the headlines? This film follows the development of the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in Taiwan and reveals the intriguing process – how the value of the smart-phones which are becoming more and more like people has got higher than the lives of the workers who are becoming more and more like machines and even the consumers who believe they are in control of their choices.
Director │LI Jun-hu
Like thousands of young people in China, Xiao-ju and Miao- miao, two girls from the rural areas, were gravitated to the cities. They didn’t even finish high school, and chose to work in a foot-washing centre because foot-washing does not require any qualification or skills and the money is not bad. This film documents these two Chinese girls from the rural areas who drift from one place to another in order to change their destinies.
Director │ Gary SHIH, HUO Ning
Producer │ Gary SHIH
By the end of 2009, an ancient tomb of the East Han Dynasty was officially identified as the tomb of CAO Cao, a warlord and the penultimate chancellor of the time. It was winter in 2008. In a small village in Anyang, Henan Province, China, where there were neither sewage systems nor street lamps, a group of archaeological workers began excavating a large tomb of the East Han Dynasty. PAN Wei-bin, the leading expert, believed the grave to be the “CAO Cao Tomb” long sought after by archaeologists. It was not until the early winter of 2009 that the gate of the tomb was revealed.The discovery, however, caused great controversies...
Director │Risa MORIMOTO
Producer │ Risa MORIMOTO, Diana LEE
Code Red examines how the Internet is transforming Chinese politics, economics and society as China enters its seventh decade under Communist rule. The film asks how the Chinese people use the Internet to address human rights and social justice and how an autocratic government is reacting to this powerful democratic medium.
Director │ CHEN Fu
Producer │YU Jia-jun, JIN Rui
Burma is one of the poorest countries in the world. The once prevailing drug problem and continuous wars are the major reasons for its poverty. Mei-ching’s hometown Kokang, the so- called mysterious “Golden Triangle,” was notorious as a drug production base and is now a casino city near the border.
Regardless of all disputes there, Burma is a land plagued by the war and poverty is an undeniable fact for the Burmese. The way for the Burmese girls to get out of poverty is to be married to the Chinese. However, in order to achieve this goal, the prices can be high. Mei-ching wants to escape from both poverty and Kokang. She believes that life will be much easier and better in China or Singapore...
Director │ LI Xiao-feng, JIA Kai
This film shows how a poor young man was driven by his father to go through the university entrance examination and to the job market where he happened to work for the controversial Foxconn Group. The underlying interest is to explore if education could really help poor kids escape from poverty and be upgraded to a higher social status in a society where class movement ladder is considered as malfunctioning.
Director │ DU Hai-bin
Producer │ Ben TSIANG
For the masses, Nationalism manifests a strong anti-foreign sentiment. Some made an amalgam of Patriotism and Nationalism with counter-western activities, especially against the US. Some also used Nationalism with commercial gains in mind. Vulgarity, blindness and hypocrisy are the characteristics of modern China’s manifestation of nationalism and patriotism. The blindness is especially obvious among the younger generation.
This documentary will take as its starting point the current activities by some post-90’s generation young people in Pinyao, China, and will build on this with material from other areas and with additional dimensions. With this structure, I want to strive for a discussion of the concept, history, development and meaning of Patriotism; the manifestation and implication of Patriotism in present-day China; ultimately to search for the real repercussions of what this type of patriotism will do to the public mind in our times.
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