Black Box Diaries

In March 2015 Shiori Itō, an ambitious young journalist, was raped by Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a senior figure with considerable influence in politics and the media. As the global #MeToo movement gathered force and attitudes towards victims began to shift elsewhere, Itō still faced censure and scrutiny from every direction — over what she wore at her press conference, over the substance of her claims, over accusations with no basis. The pressure nearly broke her.

Knowing that silence would be the easier choice, she decided to fight on against Japan’s outdated and conservative law and opinion on sexual violence, beginning a long investigation. Interviewing the taxi driver who drove them that night, the hotel doorman, the officers handling the case, Itō re-investigated as a journalist writing in the third person, documenting the whole process as a complete report and then as this film. Her actions were not only an attempt to heal her own injury but a new page for women in Japan who choose to speak.

Walk the Line

In 2023 more than 37,000 Chinese citizens fled the world’s second-largest economy, becoming the fastest-growing group at the US–Mexico border. Most crossed rainforest on foot from South America and passed through several countries to enter the United States without papers. Chinese migrants call this journey zouxian — “walking the line”.

In the spring of 2023 the Wainao team travelled with Chinese migrants from Turkey to Ecuador, from Colombia to Panama, across the Darién Gap and north, and finally into the United States from Mexico. Among them are a same-sex couple harassed by police, an unemployed man in middle age who had lived a year in a roadside van to escape zero-COVID lockdowns, middle-class families willing to risk the crossing with babies on their backs, and single women seeking freedom. Eight months later the team found these travellers again in the United States, capturing the extraordinary resilience and determination of ordinary people. Through first-hand footage and extended interviews, the film asks why they set out and what distance remains between their dreams and life after arrival.

Walk the Line took nearly a year and a half from plan to completion, with a core team drawn from several countries across four continents. Alongside individual stories it sets out the political conditions and human rights crisis behind the phenomenon.

Jang-Gae: The Foreigner

Caught between “ghost island” Taiwan and “hell Joseon”, Lee Kwang-lung is a high-school student of mixed Korean and Chinese descent. Born and raised in South Korea, bullied outside the home, he refuses to speak Chinese and insists he is Korean. At home he faces a father who has spent years campaigning for the rights of overseas Chinese and who reminds him in Chinese not to lose his roots. Amid the conflict inside and out, a girl who does not care about his background reaches him, and for a while his adolescence is free of the question of identity. Then, just as he is competing for a scholarship to study in the United States, an accident takes away the family’s support. A watch that keeps bad time can be reset — how is Kwang-lung to reset a life that has jammed?

Of Caravan and the Dogs

“The first casualty of war is truth” — true also of Putin’s war against Ukraine. In the weeks around 24 February 2022, the Russian media world came apart. Nobel Peace laureate Dmitry Muratov, the country’s most important human rights organisation Memorial, and a group of journalists and activists worked to get the truths they had uncovered out, and were treated by the state as traitors and placed one by one on the “foreign agent” list. Director Askold Kurov and an anonymous collaborator risked their lives to leave this record of reporters who would not stop fighting for press freedom.

Dahomey

As decolonisation gathered force, France finally agreed in 2021, after years of negotiation, to return twenty-six artefacts held at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris to Benin. Director Mati Diop weaves fact and fiction into a visual poem in which the dead speak to the living and the spirits of the objects meet the material world, blurring the line between life and death, reality and theatre, and giving this journey of decolonisation a layered and searching reflection.

Deepest Uprising

The director travels to Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka and the Philippines — four Asian countries with comparable colonial histories — and has sixteen women poets read their own work to camera.

They differ in ethnicity, occupation and standing: Indigenous poets, pioneers of the women’s movement, a model, a professor from a lower caste in India. The camera is never turned on a man; the director deliberately hands the right to speak back to women entirely.

Remember Me

The title comes from the inscription on conscripts’ uniform portraits — “a keepsake from Kinmen” was what photographers most often wrote on negatives shot on the island.

Filmed over eight years, it follows three people from Kinmen with very different backgrounds: a local photo-studio owner, an officer from the main island who married a Kinmen wife, and a daughter-in-law from Sichuan. Opening film of the 2022 Taiwan International Documentary Festival.

No Other Land

Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank has been designated a military “firing zone” by the Israeli government since the 1980s, and its Palestinian residents ruled to be living there unlawfully — the beginning of a long struggle against intimidation, forced displacement and demolition. Basel, a young Palestinian resident, follows his father into activism and citizen journalism. He becomes friends with the Israeli journalist Yuval, and the two use the camera as resistance, filming the everyday violence of the Israeli army towards Palestinian civilians and the fragility and endurance within the struggle. As the violence escalates, despair, powerlessness and depression settle over them, and they begin to doubt the act of recording itself.

Path of Destiny

The Sikawasay of the Amis community of Lidaw in Dongchang Village, Hualien, are people who carry spirits. Their particular calling has them maintain the traditional rites year after year; living in daily contact with the spirits, they show a mutual dependence of fate and feeling, and bear witness to a beautiful culture now fading. Following the two decades in which the field researcher Panay Mulu has accompanied them, the film uses the image to rescue vanishing ritual and to leave behind the rich landscapes and stories of these shamans’ lives — while Panay herself comes to feel, through many of her own experiences, that the spirits are guiding her onto a road she cannot avoid taking.

masan caucau

“If school is the road we have to take, then let us change it,” says Yang Ping, a fourth-grade teacher at Timur Experimental Elementary School.

Director Sasuyu Ubalat recalls an education built entirely around Chinese culture, learning that resembled Australia’s Stolen Generations. The film examines the core values of education at Timur, developing its story through the close relationships among teachers, parents and students, and showing why language revitalisation and Indigenous education matter now. Indigenous education is not only cultural grounding; it builds a deep sense of peoplehood and confidence. Even as the elders pass away and the culture is lost at speed, Timur, beset by difficulties, works hard to develop a curriculum of its own within the contemporary education system.