The inaugural Taiwan Documentary Film Festival in Bangkok will showcase the Taiwanese way of life with an eight-film-strong selection screening with English and Thai subtitles from Aug. 30 through Sept. 2.
Opening film "Small Talk" explores LGBT+ topics through dialogues between a daughter and her mother, who is a lesbian. Starting from the daughter's attempts to understand her often-absent mother, their small talk reveals the painful past shared by the two, and the feature goes on to show the audience how they slowly repair the relationship.
In "Time Splits in the River," four directors invites their fathers to star in a film by taking on the roles of dissidents in the 1980s. They begin with acting and imitating the dissidents of their own imagination, but as the plot advances they become entangled in their own past, and the film captures the reflection and introspection of their lives that were irrevocably changed after the White Terror era.
In "Le Moulin," the titular Le Moulin Poetry Society emerges in the 1930s as Taiwan's first modern art group. Their poetic protest against forty years of Japanese colonial rule was modeled upon the Surrealists, from which Le Moulin poets began composing poetry in an uncompromising and sophisticated style to confront an era of turbulence.
In "Sunflower Occupation," the eponymous Sunflower Movement, a student-led protest against the government's trade pack agreement with China without clause-by-clause review in 2014, becomes a lens for examining social consciousness and institutional injustice.
Other notable highlights include "The Silent Teacher," which documents the long and moving process of donating one's body to science after death; "The Immortal's Play," about a Vietnamese immigrant's adoption of Taiwanese opera; "The Mountain," on the history of Taiwan's indigenous recertification movement; and "Stranger in the Mountain," on the forgotten lives of Nationalist veterans living in northern Thailand and central Taiwan.
Huang Ya-li (黃亞歷), director of "Le Moulin," and Tsai Tsung-lung (蔡崇隆), co-director of "Sunflower Occupation," will also fly to Bangkok to attend two Q&A sessions and greet Thai students, film academics, and documentary filmmakers.
More information on Taiwan Documentary Film Festival in Bangkok 2018 is available at: https://www.sfcinemacity.com/movies/film-festival