Michelle Chowby Michelle Chow
語言:
English
Photo Credit: Women Makes Waves International Film Festival
“Do you have any dreams at this stage of your life?”
“No, I don’t feel like I have any dreams now. All my dreams have been shattered. What dreams could I even have at this point? I’m already 30 years old. It’s too late.”
THIS EXCHANGE TAKES place between the filmmaker and a young man named Lumi in Pei-Chi Liang’s short documentary film, “Nowhere to Go” (脫遊). The film follows Lumi in and out of employment, and in and out of housing, as he works with Yowash (友洗社創), an organization that aims to help unhoused people find employment, primarily through cleaning jobs. Interspersed with shots of trash and scenes of comradery between the street cleaners, the short reminds the viewer of the oft-ignored and underpaid labor(ers) that shape and maintain the cityscape. However, Liang’s short resists an easy false optimism. When it begins, Lumi is staying in a small apartment and working as a valued member of the organization; he’s described as Yowash’s first success story during one meeting, and he even becomes a board member of its fundraising association. By the end of the short, Lumi has lost all these tenuously achieved benefits: he no longer works with Yowash, he is being investigated for money laundering, and, with no income, he is forced to move out of his apartment. Rather than devastated, Lumi seems resigned; as he prepares to leave, he lightly remarks that he’s already packed his luggage since he knew this day would come. As he heads off into the park to look for a place to stay, he presciently comments, with a little smile, “This is the final scene.”
Last month, Taipei’s SPOT-Huashan theater was home to the Women Make Waves International Film Festival (WMWIFF). First held in 1993, the Women Make Waves festival has now completed its 31st edition–about the same age as Lumi. Over the course of ten days, the festival showed more than a hundred screenings, organized by the Taiwan Women’s Film Association around the theme of “Spacing.” Interpreted by the festival’s chairperson Joyce Tang as 缝隙 (gap, or fissure), this theme was explored with breadth and nuance through the curatorial team’s selection of films, which sounded the complex terrains of war, work, sex, gender, and national identity.
Film still from “Nowhere to Go”
“Nowhere to Go” was screened as part of the festival’s Taiwanese short film program, which was one of several series of short films screened at the festival. Among these were the Cinemini shorts (including short films hailing from Portugal, Poland, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Brazil, China, Croatia, and the United States), Midnight Playstation shorts (showcasing the horror and suspense genre), the Master in Playhouse shorts (the work of a single auteur, which this year was American experimental filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh), the Becoming as an Act of Resistance shorts (focused on the struggle and resilience of youth), and the Notes on a Free Palestine shorts (highlighting the work of Palestinian and Arab filmmakers). The Taiwanese short film program was also part of the WMWIFF’s “Taiwan Competition,” which highlights new work from Taiwanese directors. This program included 12 short films in total, each under a half hour in length, and displayed an impressive array of stylistic and generic diversity.
Many of these shorts wrestled with anxieties about labor and the conditions of work, fluidly toggling between individual and structural concerns. These ranged from the more traditional documentary format of “Nowhere to Go;” to the more frenetic pulse of Wei Dai’s “Landing Countdown” (著陸倒數), which shifts between an admittedly confusing sci-fi premise and a genuinely impressive sequence depicting the eternal twilight of overworked truck drivers; to Pei-Chi Tsai’s “Sweet Samara” (甜蜜迴圈), an adorable animation about a dough-ball boy discovering the horrors of the (donut) assembly line. Inspired by her sister’s experiences in dance class, Lo-Yao Huang’s “Those Who Dance,” follows a promising young ballerina at odds with her draconian new teacher. The short, which won the Taiwan Film Critics Association Recommended Award and the Wang Dao Women’s Power Audience Vote Award, elevates a conventional narrative through technical execution and standout performances by the two leads.
Another common thread–often interwoven with that of labor-related angst–was generational connection and divide. A semi-fantastical mise-en-abyme that actually takes the viewer on a journey through the abyss, Jae Yang’s “Cry Me Through Hell” (地獄催淚部) centers around a young filmmaker and her now-deceased father, as she struggles with his passing and the souring of their relationship, largely caused by his negative reaction to her choice of work. While she directs a film based on this argument, her father’s ghost travels through hell, unable to move on until she cries for him. An-Chi Wang’s beautifully animated “Grandma” (棉被山) likewise grapples with the passing of a loved one, as well as the demolition of the military dependants’ village (眷村) where she lived. In her short, “My Home” (林家小院), which won the Taiwan Competition Jury’s Special Mention, Yiting Lin reflects on the complex nature of her attachment to her family and her home, in between jiujitsu practice, her second year of high school, and a collision with an RV, the aftermath of which she documents from inside the ambulance. Not unlike Lumi, she takes a sort of unflappable, half-smiling approach to her troubles; after the crash, she jokes, “I just ruined my summer vacation.”
Several of the shorts were particularly concerned with the environment they are produced in. Perhaps both most overt and successful in this respect was Cheng-Ying Song and Chin-Ya Hu’s “Bird-Window Collisions” (窗殺). Their documentary chronicles the eponymous casualties (caused when birds flying at high speed collide into glass windows or buildings) and the efforts by graduate students to collect data on these collisions in order to push for change. The cinematography is delicately macabre, at times shatteringly beautiful, framed with the precision of a more eco-consciously inclined Wes Anderson flick, yet with a sense of total tender sincerity mirrored by that of the two researchers, Chi-Heng Hsieh and Chia-Yun Kan. There are almost as many shots of birds flitting through the trees as there are of their corpses being gently measured, autopsied, and taxidermied, and the sheer gentleness and care of the filmmaking somehow makes the latter seem as lovely and dignified as the former. “Our responsibility is to arrange a proper funeral for them so their stories can be preserved,” remarks one of the students as she softly smooths down the fluff on a dead bird’s head. In her taxidermy, she purposefully maintains the bird’s crooked beak, the evidence of its fatal encounter with the invisible glass. The data accumulates, and the end of the film takes us to a moment of victory: Hsieh teaching a group of NTU students how to set up preventative measures on their building’s huge glass windows. Evoking the deliberate measurement of the film itself, this method involves placing stickers in a grid pattern, small enough to tell the bird that what it thinks is air is actually a no-fly zone, yet only barely noticeable to the human occupants.
Film still from “Bird-Window Collisions”
Yun-Tien Chu’s “My terra” (初始之地), which won the Silver Award in the Taiwan Competition, takes this outward-looking approach in another direction. “My terra” follows Rianne, a young Taiwanese-Nigerian woman adopted by a Dutch family, as she takes a trip to Taiwan to reconnect with her birth mother. The film captures the complicated, contradictory sentiments of this trip–awkwardness and familiarity, expectation and disappointment, loss and love–in ways that are sure to resonate strongly with viewers who have experienced, even if not these exact circumstances, other encounters with alienation and return. When Rianne first reunites with her birth mother, they talk in Chinese, which Rianne is still learning. In the midst of this emotional reunion, Rianne (still out of breath from climbing up the stairs) is tripped up by a sentence her mother says, and their conversation is briefly interrupted as she figures it out–a moment that is painfully relatable to all second-language learners. In the midst of the film, Rianne visits a fortune-teller and discusses her feelings of alienation, both in the Netherlands and in Taiwan, and the fortune-teller names that emotion: 歸屬感, the feeling of rootedness. But that feeling remains elusive throughout the film, only fleetingly, bittersweetly glimpsed–in rides on the back of a motorbike, in aimless wandering around a night market, in the hairstyle your mother brushes out for you.
Unlike feature films, there is not a major commercial market for shorts, which are often produced on a smaller budget and with more limited resources. As Johannes Riis writes, the short film tends to be considered a “student” genre, more an “opportunity to practice and improve narrative skills without the costs and pains of a long production period” than art in its own right. Most shorts are produced by early career and student filmmakers–although major directors also occasionally dip their toes back into the form (like Yorgos Lanthimos’s recent Kinds of Kindness, an anthology of interlocked shorts).
We would be remiss to relegate short films to the background based on these preconceptions. The same qualities that make short film a popular student genre are those that make it a more accessible format for all marginalized filmmakers. Even when produced by more experienced filmmakers, short films inherently have a flexibility that allows their filmmakers to get weird, to try new things, to practice, in ways that would often be impossible with the constraints of longer and more expensive production. While some filmmakers use the short form to create a tightly contained narrative with a high degree of polish, others make use of its brevity to generate a more fragmentary effect, like Da-Fong Wang’s stop-motion animated piece, “The Sparkle, the Blossom, and the Milky Land” (那奶水綻放之地), a playful and enigmatic exploration of femininity, motherhood, and the body, through textile art. Yi-Tzu Lan’s “The Horse” (馬語), in which a horse suddenly appears while a young woman is packing to move house, likewise retains a sense of mystery. It’s difficult to imagine how even a more abstract longer work could effectively sustain this quality, much as a novel would be hard-pressed to emulate the affective dimensions of a poem.
As thoughtful, exciting programming like that of the WMWIFF demonstrates, some of the most vital work is being produced in short form. The unique potential of short films was strikingly apparent in the series of Palestinian films screened at the festival, including incredible entries like Basma Al-Sharif’s poetic “We Begin by Measuring Distance” (2009), which blends documentary footage with choreographed performance as, in Al-Sharif’s words, “innocent measurements transition into political ones,” or like Mona Benyamin’s gorgeously strange “Moonscape” (2020), a sung-through quasi-surrealist ballad recounting the filmmaker’s research and email exchanges with a company selling lunar real estate, which takes as its point of departure the question of why it’s easier for Palestinians to buy land on the moon than to return home.
With the Golden Horse, Taiwan’s biggest film festival, now running from November 7th to 24th, it’s as good a time as any to watch some excellent cinema, of any length, and to especially keep an eye out for the next generation of filmmakers.