Eagle Hand | Cascade Park Community Library

14:30–17:00 Screening: Eagle Hand, followed by an online conversation with the director
Free admission, with English subtitles. Lotus root tea from Niudoushan will be served.

All Static & Noise

The title comes from a line in a 2017 speech by Chinese Communist Party officials at Xinjiang University: all “static and noise” must be eliminated.

Built on three hundred hours of interviews, the film follows Jewher, a young Uyghur woman separated from her father at Beijing airport when he was detained, and Abduweli, a linguist and poet imprisoned and tortured for teaching Uyghur to six-year-olds, who makes his way to Istanbul after his release. Survivors and families in Turkey, Kazakhstan, Europe and the United States give testimony that assembles the scale of the “re-education camps”.

State Organs

State Organs is not fiction but something still happening. Two young people vanish; two families spend twenty years searching for them. In pursuing the truth they uncover a chain of forced organ harvesting run by the machinery of the state.

Filmed over seven years, the documentary gathers extensive first-hand testimony and recordings made by victims, has won numerous international awards, and was shortlisted for Best Documentary Feature at the 2025 Academy Awards. Through its images the audience enters that truth, seeing resistance, injury and choice under the pressure of absolute power, and reconsidering what human rights, freedom and dignity actually mean.

Inside the Red Brick Wall

In November 2019 the anti-extradition movement reached its fiercest point at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Protesters called for strikes and blocked the Cross-Harbour Tunnel; police moved to clear them, and large numbers withdrew into the PolyU campus, which was then completely surrounded.

The filmmakers stayed inside the walls, recording the judgements, arguments and fear of the siege. For their own safety the directors are not named, credited only as “Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers”.

Winner of Best Editing at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and the Robert and Frances Flaherty Prize at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.

Pusu Qhuni

Set against the 1930 Musha Incident, Pusu Qhuni records the descendants of the Seediq people returning, eighty years later, to Pusu Qhuni — the great rock where the ancestral spirits originate — walking again the land their ancestors walked, in search of collective memory and historical truth.

Through the life stories of survivors’ descendants, the film shows the forced relocation, the loss of close kin and the distance from home that followed the incident, and the collective memory long suppressed within that history. As stories sealed away for decades are gradually opened, people are finally able to travel to that remote high country and stand at Pusu Qhuni, considering, on a journey into history, what forgiveness, reconciliation and cultural continuity really mean.

Breaking the Wall

Directed by Lee Hui-jen and filmed over seven years, Breaking the Wall centres on Peter Huang, a central figure in the Taiwan independence movement, and looks back over half a century of his life and his part in the democracy movement. Starting from Huang’s later years, the film re-examines the choices he made within the currents of history and his unchanging convictions about freedom, Taiwanese identity and democratic values.

Through rare archival footage, interviews and long-term observational filming, it presents not only Huang’s life but the course of Taiwan’s democratisation, and how a generation of political actors held to their beliefs between ideals and circumstance. As the body and the memory of its subject grow old, his commitment to freedom and justice becomes clearer, leading the audience to reconsider history, memory and what passes between generations.

Spring Rain 424

On 24 April 1970, three young Taiwanese studying in the United States — Peter Huang, Cheng Tzu-tsai and Huang Chin-mei — attempted to assassinate Chiang Ching-kuo, then vice-premier, in New York. The shot went wide, but the act rang around the world, and the lives of all three changed utterly as they were forced into exile. An ambitious work that fills in a missing page of Taiwanese history: interviews across Europe and the Americas, a search through scattered records, and animated reconstruction of a secret operation of which almost no footage survives. It sets aside the language of heroism to attend to the drifting lives the assassins lived afterwards, and recovers the overlooked women who took part, letting the spring rain that shook an authoritarian state half a century ago fall into public view again.

Behind the Mask

The film records the experience of the Uyghur linguist Abduweli Ayup. After studying in the United States he returned home and worked to establish mother-tongue education for young children, only to be detained under ethnic policy and, after his release, forced into exile. Years later, so that the history would not be forgotten, he decided to face a past he would rather not revisit, travelling to Germany to confront a former guard from the detention camp. Can a conversation across such identity and such injury bring him the truth he has long been looking for?

Island of the Winds

Island of the Winds, directed by Hsu Ya-ting, is set on a hillside as isolated as an island, and records a group of people long cut off from the world because of leprosy. A century of isolation left the place sleeping outside of history, until a sudden plan to relocate them for an airport broke the long silence and forced the residents to face their own lives, their home and a forgotten history.

With their home about to vanish, and with power trying to erase every trace that the land and its people had existed, they woke out of silence. Across twenty years of resistance and care, people who had been shut away by society began to record their own lives in their own way, to defend their home, and to claim the right to be seen and remembered.

Wind runs through the film as its central image. On this island the wind never stops; it cannot be held, but it can be seen in the swaying of branches. So too with these lives: forgotten by history and forced into silence, they have still left their mark simply by existing.

From New Guinea to Taipei

Seventy years ago the director’s grandfather was conscripted into the Takasago Volunteers and sent to fight American forces in New Guinea. Fifty years ago his father left home in the tide of capitalism to make a living far away. Today Dulan has become another battleground, contested between the state and corporations. Three generations of one family meet and come to understand one another through their lives, in the foreign ground of New Guinea.