Wen-ling Lin, Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Chiao Tung University In addition to its spotlight on the American director Victor Masayesva, (a member of the Hopi Tribe) the 2007 Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival’s Director in Focus program will also highlight local talent. We are delighted to introduce Mayaw Biho, a documentary director and member of…
The Making of Songs of Pasta’ay Tai-li HU Research Fellow, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica This year’s Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival will show “Songs of Pasta’ay” together with Nobuto Miyamoto’s “Pas-taai — The Saisiyat Ceremony in 1936”, ingeniously bringing together two works that share the same topic, but were filmed 50 years apart. Reviewing Taiwanese ethnographic film history, although…
A Time Capsule from the Last Century Pastaai — The Saisiyat Ceremony in 1936 Chia-Yu HU Department of Anthropology, National Taiwan University As we now live in an age of photography and mechanical reproduction, does that mean, as Walter Benjamin believed, that we are also entering an age when the aura disappears? By viewing the 1936 film of the Saisiyat…
Dead Birds—a classic work in early history of ethnographic film—is about the Dani, a people dwelling in the Grand Valley of the highlands of New Guinea. It was shot in 1961 by Robert Gardner, a famous ethnographic filmmaker with an anthropology background who started shooting and editing ethnographic films and documentaries in the 1950s. In 1960, the Aboriginal Affairs Minister…
Pei-Yi KUO Assistant Research Fellow, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica Every year the Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival chooses non-mainstream ethnographic films produced in the past two or three years for the “New Vision” program. The films in this showcase are from different regions across the world, and each film is concerned with a different topic that reflects the…