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.
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