After the Vietnam War, thousands of refugees drifted at sea. Between 1977 and 1988 the Chiang-mei refugee camp in Penghu took in more than two thousand Vietnamese refugees — a chapter of Taiwan’s participation in international humanitarian relief that almost no one knows.
Director Liu Chien-wei visits the former camp and the people who lived through it, reconstructing this “camp unknown” and asking where those people went afterwards.
Eight years after the “709 crackdown”, the film returns to China’s human rights lawyers and to their wives, children and friends — some still in China, others in exile abroad.
In late 2019 the authorities again arrested human rights lawyers and members of the New Citizens’ Movement who had taken part in gatherings across the country, and lawyers’ families were forced to leave China. What this film records is what happens after the arrests: how the people left behind go on living.
Eternal Spring combines animation with documentary footage to reconstruct the 2002 television signal hijacking in Changchun, China. Adapted from the work of Chinese comic artist Daxiong (Guo Jingxiong) and directed by Canadian filmmaker Jason Loftus.
On 5 March 2002, 32 cable channels in Changchun, Jilin Province were interrupted for nearly 50 minutes by broadcasts exposing the suppression of religious freedom. More than 100,000 residents saw it. Within an hour the authorities launched a mass crackdown; an estimated 5,000 people were unlawfully detained, and 18 of those involved were tortured, some to death.
Daxiong, whose artwork anchors the film, was forced to flee to North America. Loftus faced repeated pressure and threats during production, but held firm: if he could not tell the truth while living in freedom, he said, he would regret it later.
The film premiered at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival in March 2022 and went on to win the Audience Award and the Rogers Audience Award at Hot Docs. It was Canada’s submission for Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards — the first Chinese-language film ever to represent Canada in that category.
For Sama, co-directed by Syrian filmmaker Waad al-Kateab and British director Edward Watts, won the Golden Eye at Cannes. Shot inside a Syrian war zone, it records the daily lives of ordinary people under siege.
The film is framed as a letter from Waad to her daughter Sama, born during the war, recounting five years of her youth in Aleppo.
Waad lived with her doctor husband Hamza and their daughter in a hospital in the rebel-held part of the city. Facing bombardment every day and expecting that she might not survive, she filmed so that Sama would one day know who her parents were, what they hoped for, and how she came into the world.
The hospital was bombed. People were attacked with gas. Government forces killed women and children. Newly parents, Waad and Hamza were forced to flee, saying goodbye in tears to the city that had held their youth and their dreams. What the violence could not destroy was their daughter — and what she stands for.
For Sama is not only a documentary but a mother’s declaration of love to her child, and a portrait of tenderness and endurance in wartime.
Mission: Joy documents five days in 2015 when two Nobel Peace laureates — the 14th Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa — spent time together in Dharamsala, India.
Crossing the boundaries of religion and culture, the film captures their deep friendship and their shared understanding of joy and compassion. It draws on The Book of Joy, which recorded the two spiritual leaders’ conversations about finding joy amid the suffering of life.
The acclaimed debut feature by Vietnamese director Hà Lệ Diễm became one of the year’s most talked-about documentaries, invited to more than thirty major festivals worldwide. Filmed over four years, it follows Di, a 14-year-old Hmong girl, from a carefree childhood into adolescence.
Like any teenage girl, Di faces questions of family income, schooling and first love — but she must also live with the threat of “bride kidnapping”, a custom still practised in her village. On Lunar New Year’s Eve she disappears for a night, and her parents understand at once that her childhood is over and that the fate she feared most has arrived early. Forced to grow up overnight, Di confronts the hard realities of the adult world.
Arrested as a young man for taking part in a reading group, Hsu Yi-sheng broke under torture and named a friend, who was executed. After his release he carried the guilt, shutting himself away in a nursing home for more than a decade.
One day he decides to go out and look for his friend’s grave, wanting to say sorry before he dies. What he finds along the way is not only the residue of the White Terror but the Taiwan that emerged after martial law.
A 1994 film by Wan Jen, part of his “Super” trilogy. Winner of Best Leading Actor (Lin Yang) and Best Original Film Score at the 32nd Golden Horse Awards.
The Taoyuan Aerotropolis is the largest urban plan in Taiwan’s history; tens of thousands of residents must leave the land they live from.
Before the neighbourhoods are levelled, the film maps space along one axis and history along the other, recording the tangled feelings of the days before demolition and leaving a record of the people, places and objects now disappearing.
In the 1980s, after the lifting of martial law, Taiwanese society was undergoing rapid economic and social change. Indigenous people were moving to cities and leaving the mountains for wage labour. Three lives — the director’s father Pan Ming-fu (Du-Ya), the Amis and Kavalan artist Duwake, and Lai-Sa-Gai-Nu of the Xiangbi community — unfolded separately yet intertwined, each shaped by the hard necessity of leaving home.
Yet none of them stayed in the city and turned away from where they came from. In an era when Indigenous identity counted for little, they faced their own identity and worth squarely, and held on to their culture and to who they were.
鑑於近年的世界局勢，因著極權主義的擴張，我們看見許多人群，不分種族、宗教、性別與身分，紛紛起身對抗極權，因此今年我們以「反抗者的身影」作為的首屆主題，在中正紀念堂民主大道上，露天撥出三部分別以台灣、香港與中國的影片，介紹三地社會與民主發展的今昔。
第一場次Session 1：
辯護人-中國維權律師二十年（2022）
The Defenders — 20 Years of Human Rights Lawyers in China(2022)
時間Time：10:30-12:00
第二場次Session 2：
超級大國民（1994）Super Citizen Ko(1994)
時間Time：14:00-16:00
第三場次Session 3：
憂鬱之島(2022) Blue Isand(2022)
時間Time：16:20-18:00