A major public controversy has broken out after Fu Yue, the director of the winning film for best documentary at this year’s Golden Horse Awards, tearfully declared on stage that she hoped one day to see Taiwan recognized as a politically independent entity...
On Happiness Road would be one of the rare examples of a Taiwanese animation to make it to the theater in past years. Nevertheless, despite high-profile attempts to promote the view by the Taiwanese government, as well as Taiwanese celebrities, the film proved a failure at the box offices. It remains to be seen whether this film will gain more attention now that it has been shortlisted as a contender for Best Animated Film at this year's Academy Awards...
The much-anticipated South African film of the year, The Wound, was officially released on the 27th of April, 2018, in the UK. The film was much anticipated because it is indeed one of the very few films that deal with aspects of homoeroticism and homosexuality in traditional African communities. But what to make of the film and reactions to it among white, liberal audiences?...
“Fantasy”, directed by Yen Lan-Chuan and Chuang Yi-Tseng, provides a look at the last days of the Ciaotou Sugar Refinery in Kaohsiung, which was converted into an artists’ village by a group of artists who hoped to preserve the structure...
"Motherland" directed by Ramona S. Diaz, would be an examination of the lives of pregnant women at Dr. Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital, the so-called “baby factory” of the Philippines. In this sense, the film is a look at the overpopulation crisis of the Philippines at the very human level of the conditions faced by the pregnant women living in conditions of poverty who give birth at the Fabella Memorial Hospital...
Yang Chun-Kai's “Path of Destiny” would be a deft evocation of the challenges facing preservation of indigenous tradition in Taiwan. Namely, even in those rare cases in which young people actively aim to participate in traditions which may soon be lost, the trend may be irreversible. And given inescapable social tensions between modernity and tradition, adherence to tradition demands great personal sacrifice....
Joshua: Teenager Vs. Superpower makes no attempts to hide that it is an attempt to lionize its titular character or that, as a documentary, it is a Hollywood-style film. And while capably produced, it has all the strengths and weakness of an attempt to make the chaos of a social movement into a Hollywood-style narrative...
Small Talk, directed by Huang Hui-Chen, is in many ways a remarkable film, but it is also an incredibly unsettling one. Small Talk is a highly personal film, as a documentary detailing Huang’s relation with her mother, Ah-Nu. In particular, Huang’s relation with her mother, who works as a Daoist priestess, is troubled because of Ah-Nu’s emotional distance, as well as that Ah-Nu, a lesbian, had two daughters from an abusive marriage...
