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?
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