Two feature films "I Didn’t Dare To Tell You (不敢跟你講)" and "The End of the Track (跑道終點)" by Taiwanese pioneer director Mou Tun-fei (牟敦芾) will be screened online at the Harvard Film Archive (HFA) Virtual Cinematheque from Jan. 21 to 30.
Unearthed after half a century, these two titles first appeared on the big screen at the Taiwan International Documentary Festival under the title "Imagine the Avant-Garde: Taiwan's Film Experiments in the 1960s (想像式前衛：1960s的電影實驗)" in 2018.
"I Didn't Dare to Tell You" depicts a primary school student, Da-Yuan, who secretly works a night job to pay off his father's gambling debts. "The End of the Track" focuses on two main characters who are publicly mocked as homosexual partners for being inseparable friends.
Born in Shandong, China, Mou relocated to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War in 1949. After graduating from the National School of Arts, Mou shot his first feature film "I Didn’t Dare To Tell You" in 1969, and directed "The End of the Track" the following year. Mou was one of the young directors who advanced Taiwan's avant-garde movement by shooting experimental films that confronted the mainstream culture of the time. He depicted the struggles of the lower class and confronted the taboo of homosexuality through the work he created in a repressive political climate, which on a broader level reflected how the most daring and creative artists in Taiwan formed their own avant-garde movement in the 1960s.
While Mou made 14 films in total, the two films included in this series are the only feature films he directed in Taiwan, and they are among the nation's first independent titles.
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