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.

Screenings of this film