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.
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