Program Overview

Currently in the war-torn state in Myanmar, waves of poor workers flock to the war zone in order to dig for jade. With sample digging tools in hand, they are dreaming of getting rich overnight. The oldest brother of director Midi Z was among them.

With this film, Midi tries to find out why his brother became a drug addict and abandoned his family. The film depicts not only the personal story in Midi‘s family but also how people struggle for survival in the darkest corners of Myanmar.

Director Wenxi穩死and his producer BS 豪洨are two best friends. In order to fulfill the dreaming of making zombie film, they decide to join the local gangers to make some money. By chance, the mafia boss reads the script and loves it so much that he decides to invest their zombie film. Only with one condition: his girlfriend Chanel must be the leading actress in the movie. This unexpected decision leads to a series of difficulties and unimaginable challenges when Chanel accidentally died during the shooting. So the problem is, how can they keep the secret from the vicious boss and even make the movie work?

Three young girls escape from the defenseless raid of their family and hide separately. Fifteen years later, they become warriors, determined to seek vengeance for their parents. The eldest sister, disguised as a man, leaves her master and searches for the bandits. Eventually she crosses paths with her sisters, who both unwittingly fall in love with this handsome stranger. One day, the bandit leader lures them to a bloody showdown, but can the three sisters unite to avenge the murder of their parents?

A stellar cast of Taiwanese opera stars was assembled to present a rare Taiwanese-language Wuxia film. The female characters, skilled and courageous warriors fighting together in a male-dominated world, are a powerful representation of independent women. Meanwhile, elements such as an illicit inn and a woman dressing as a man pay homage to King Hu’s classic Dragon Inn (1967).

This incisive documentary brings back to life a Taiwanese film genre that was given up for dead. In the early 1980s, a time of strict censorship and political repression in Taiwan, an unexpected trend in “social realist” crime films suddenly flourished in the corner of exploitation cinema. However, the “social realism” here is a euphemistic description for what is really a B-film genre, which exploited both sex and violence.

Given momentum by sensational dramas featuring female avengers, these films marked an interesting counterpoint to the rise of Taiwan New Cinema, the definitive new wave movement in Taiwan’s film history. This documentary comprises fragments from many of these now untraceable films, alongside interviews with the filmmakers who were involved.

In Shanghai, Hai-Nan, son of a Chinese official, is found stabbed on the street. But when the culprit, Li-Fang, is apprehended, she refuses to reveal her motives. Meanwhile, a police officer grows suspicious of the officials’ rush to close the case. As he searches for leads in the case files, a shocking truth about Li-Fang is revealed.

Adapted from the “scar literature” of Mainland China, this anti-communist film uses a woman’s drastic change in personality after she is raped by Chinese officials and his son as an allusion to the Mainland’s political corruption. Taiwan was still under martial law at the time the film was made, so setting a story in Shanghai allowed the makers to circumvent Taiwan’s strict censorship laws on sex and violence. It is also worth noting that at that time, the distributors marketed the film around the female lead LU Hsiao-Fen’s sexy image, which was far removed from the film’s essence of social realism and its political message.

The film unfolds the difficult conversations between director Huang and her butch lesbian mother, Ah-nu. Ah-nu suffers from an abusive relationship in a forced marriage. She runs off with her two little girls and launches her own funeral performance service. The director decides to film her mother and resolve the conflict which exists over 20 years. Together, Huang and her mother start a journey to face the tragic events of the past and walk out of the shadows.

TAIPEILOVE* is a documentary on the perception of homosexuality in Taiwanese society and its fight for same-sex marriage. In May 2019 Taiwan legalized the same-sex marriage and became the only country in Asia where same-sex marriage is legal. So how Taiwan achieved that through years. The film deals with the questions: How free, safe and happy can gays and lesbians live in Taiwanese society? How do their families and friends react? What role do religion, societal and cultural expectations play?

Decades of over development in the mountains, illegal hunting and frequent human activities, which caused the Taiwan Black Bear’s nearly extinction. Since 2008, the experienced mountaineer/director Chueh-Ming Mai leads his team to document Professor Mei-show Huang, who is the only researcher ever studied the Taiwan Black Bear deep in the forest that is more than 50 Kilometers away from the civilization, for more than 11 years.

They documented together the capture and release operations on the wild Taiwan Black Bears, trying to release the messages on behalf of the mountains, forests and different kind of species. Through the epic aesthetics visual, the audiences can together, reveal and explore the beauty of the mountain of Taiwan, to get a sense of the passion from the research and filming teams towards the bear, and the ordeals for the bears in the wild all over the world.