Hey Jimmy is a short documentary about ‘Black Jimmy,’ a black Taiwanese drag queen. The piece considers the socio-cultural complexities of the protagonist’s mixed parentage. A contemporary urban narrative, the documentary incorporates animation to create affectionately comical insight.
Scars on Memory is Taiwanese queer documantarian Mickey Chen’s soothing and melancholy epilogue to his queer trilogy, which includes the famous Boys for Beauty (1999) and the controversial documentary on lesbian relationships Memorandum on Happiness(2003).
In Scars on Memory, Mickey Chen parallels and interweaves two gay love stories in a pretty diaspora and literaryway. Continuing his thematic focus on constructing…
An average of 400 children are born in Nicaragua every day, 100 of them to adolescent mothers.
This documentary narrates the lives of three such adolescents. None of the three had planned to be a mother at such an early age. We sought them out and followed their lives for several months, learning about their families, their stories of love,…
“Transsexual in Pakistan” is about the “khusras,” a marginal community within Pakistani society. They are born male, but devote themselves to searching outand developing the feminine side of their souls. They are transsexual from the western physiological point of view, but to the local Pakistanis, what the khusras signify is beyond gender differences. People treat the khusras as the most…
Mark and Erik are an “unmarried” gay couple who have been together for ten years. They long to have biological children. Searching for a surrogate mother on the internet, they meet Wen, a wife, mother and practicing witch. Over the next three years, this unique partnership encounters unforeseen obstacles that challenge their desire for a child and threaten the growing…
This film depicts a moment of flirtation in a joking relationship between N!ai, the young wife of Gunda, and her great uncle, Tik!kay, under the shade of a big tree. Through the lens, the director of this film leads the audience to ponder on the possible relationships between the two sexes. The flirtation between the protagonists, indeed, is based on…
John Marshall is reunited with Toma’s family in 1978. Like the majority of Ju/’hoansi, they have settled at Tjum!kui, an administrative post run by the South African government. They came looking for water, jobs and an easier life, but found poverty, malnutrition and violence. Desperate for a more stable existence, the family heads back to their traditional water hole, /Aotcha,…
A Kalahari Family is a five-part, six-hour series documenting 50 years in the lives of the Ju/’hoansi of southern Africa, from 1951 to 2000. These once independent hunter-gatherers experience dispossession, confinement to a homeland, and the chaos of war. Then, as hope for Namibian independence and the end of apartheid grows, the Ju/’hoansi fight to establish farming communities and reclaim…
When Geraldine Kawangka’s husband died she and her six children moved out of their suburban-style house at Aurukun on Cape York Peninsula. In earlier times their bark house would have been abandoned and burnt to avoid contact with the dead man’s spirit and to allow it to return to its own traditional country. Now, with Western-style housing, this is no…
This is the third film in the Turkana Conversations trilogy: it investigates the views of the Turkana, and especially Turkana women, on marriage and polygyny. As the plans for a marriage in a nearby homestead unfold, the film explores why a Turkana woman would want her husband to take a second (or third) wife, and how the system of polygyny…
The first film in the Turkana Conversations trilogy is a multifaceted portrait of Lorang, the head of the homestead and one of the important senior men of the Turkana. Because they are relatively isolated and self-sufficient, most Turkana (including Lorang’s son) see their way of life continuing unchanged into the future. But Lorang thinks otherwise, for he has seen something…
In December 7th, 2003, the first nationwide organization of “foreign brides,” the Taiwan Southern Asia-Pacific Sisterhood, was established. The association calls for foreign sisters to actively interact with their local communities throughout the island.
Despite diverse nationalities, cultural backgrounds and languages, these sisters are inseparably bound by the fate they share. Languages in Taiwan—Mandarin, Hakka, Minnan—become their common tongue in…
The protagonist of this film, Shei-Ting, is a Hakka woman from Songkou Township, Meichow City, in mainland China. When she was 27, she met Mr. Chen, from Meinong, who was visiting China to look over prospective brides.Despite her entire family’s disagreement, Shei-Ting decided to marry him and emigrate to Taiwan.
This film aims to demonstrate the fighting spirit and the…
At the end of Van Goghstraat in Amsterdam is the Veerhuis. A normal residential house in a normal urban area, where children play outside the front door. But people come to the Veerhuis to die. Together with family and friends, they temporarily create their own surroundings. An important fundamental of this “just-like home” ethos is offering personal care based on…
This is the story of an unusual nuclear family, Roberta and Philip and the two chimpanzees they adopted, Charlie and his half sister Casey. It shows the joys and challenges of life with our closest primate relatives. The film investigates the chimpanzees’ adaptive abilities when removed from their natural habitat, their amazing mental capabilities, and the bonding love that exists…
Young people living in a residential care unit conceive and develop a gangster film in which the staff are cast in the roles of the international mafia. Scenes of the gangster drama are interwoven with the daily hassles the kids have to negotiate.
A grandmother’s everlasting love for her husband, who apparently died during WWII, becomes a mysterious love story. Her grandchild discovers a photograph from Bombay, which appears to indicate he didn’t die after all. An emotional and disturbing journey in search of truth, with its rare, vivid and romantic pre-WWII film footage. But when should the truth remain a secret?
Norway, summer of 2000. We meet 33-year-old Sigrid Beate Edvardsen during the last days before going to jail to serve a sentence of seven years for killing her own father. As a child, Sigrid Beate was subjected to sexual abuse, and the film uncovers a terrible family tragedy. Still, one is left with many questions. The film does not try…
A personal voyage, attempting to decipher the mystery behind migrant Thai workers’ warm and loving bonds with their children, based almost solely on telephone calls and letters.
The filmmaker, living in a Kibbutz and father to seven children, tries to understand the Thai workers’ inner conflicts, as they are caught between pressing economic pressures and emotional ties to their families…
Are we 100\% male or female? Jonas (35) knows he is neither. Does it matter? Jonas was once a woman but now spends 17 hours a week in the gym and loves how masculine it makes him look. This is what he wants, but he doesn’t know why. He wants an easy life, but he has to make some difficult…
Himalayan children, barely of school age, are sent to Buddhist monasteries to apprentice as young lamas. This film takes us along on the journey of three such children through daily rituals, games, a scripture contest, and festival preparations. On a winter holiday break, they return home and reunite with their families. Through the rare glimpse of this homecoming we see…
本片紀錄了2002年在印度西部Gujarat省因政治和宗教理念相左而引發的大屠殺事件，深入探討仇恨的政治；將之與1930年代德國納粹種族淨化的意識型態相比較，以點出種族仇恨歷史事件重演的盲點，進而申張反仇恨/暴力的理念。
Struck by the difference between the political apathy of American youth and the exhilarating momentum of Taiwan’s social and political movements, the filmmaker navigates cultural, geographical and linguistic distances in search of wisdom and hope from her 100 year-old Taiwanese activist grandmother.
The filmmaker interviews her grandmother and people her knew her, just before her grandmother enters a full-care facility.…
Kalsang Dolma, a young Tibetan refugee living in Quebec, crosses the Himalayas. Into “the largest prison in the world,” she carries a video message recorded by the spiritual and political leader of the Tibetans, the Dalai Lama. Families gather around the tiny screen, transfixed, and for one of the first times, the voice of this fragile people under the yoke…
Kimbo Hu, called “the godfather of aboriginal folk songs,” is a pioneer of the folk music movement. When Taiwan’s democratization movement was at its height, he sang about the unfair treatment which the aboriginal peoples have suffered. Today, as the aboriginal movement seems to be at an end , Kimbo Hu has returned to his life as a singer, releasing…
Baunay Watan enthusiastically traces his Atayal ancestors’ trail, with the help of the elders of Mepenox and some young cultural workers. They successfully revive an old convention, which had disappeared from daily life for 45 years — the ceremonies of the millet-growing cycle, and the wisdom that comes from people, nature, and local customs working together. They spare no efforts…
This is a story that has been forgotten by many of us, but not by Mr. Tomohide Kadowaki, President of Japan’s Akebono Association, who has devoted his life to taking care of the Takasago Volunteers, Taiwanese aboriginal men [were they from a specific tribe or village?] who were drafted into [or volunteered for? ] the Japanese Imperial Army during World…
For years, urban people have seen the mountain country as a pure wonderland. When they get bored with the city, they visit the mountains and enjoy the hospitality of the ethnic minorities there. The director and cameraman go to the mountains with the typical expectations of urban people — that the local ethnic minority people are supposed to prepare meals…
Through an initiative of the National Film Board of Canada in collaboration with the Kativik School Board , eight students were selected to document this pivotal year of their lives. To teach them the essentials of filmmaking , the NFB dispatched independent filmmakers Daniel Cross and Mila Aung-Thwin. The result of their collaboration is Inuuvunga, a vibrant and utterly contemporary…
The family of the great Yolngu leader Dhakiyarr Wirrpanda is searching for answers. Seventy years after his controversial murder trial and subsequent disappearance, Dhakiyarr’s body has still not been found. His descendants know that justice was not served. They want to restore what was denied to him: his honour. This is their story, told in their own words—of two laws,…
The Kaimas are settlers in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, without land of their own, living on small plots on the outskirts of Goroka town by arrangement with the traditional landowners. The soil is too poor to grow their food and they have to rely on cash earnings to survive.
Lukas sometimes finds part-time work as a night…
This is not just one more film about the monuments of Angkor, their history or their architecture. This film is about the people who live there. An inside view, in the shadow of the temples and the great kapok trees, an inhabited shadow that the world’s tourists pass through unawares, wrapped up in contemplating the treasures of Khmer art. In…
Wai San Ding Island, an isolated sandbar off the west coast of Taiwan, has already drifted from the coast of Yunlin County to Chiayi County. The film documents the changes of Wai San Ding Island, and is narrated by the director in the first-person. The film consists of four parts and documents the daily life of the people whose lives…
This film touches on the sensitive issues of national and ethnic identity in Taiwan. In 1965, Chen Yao-Chi directed the first objective Taiwanese documentary, Liu Pi-Chia. The main character, Liu Pi-Chia, was press-ganged into the Nationalist army in the 1940s in China, and came over to Taiwan with President Chiang Kai-Shek. After several decades, we unexpectedly met Liu in a…
The Guan-Du Plain is the largest agricultural district within Taipei city, covering hundreds of hectares. A-Lang and his wife, who come from Ping-dong, own and farm on one-third of the plain. However, they profit nothing from the extent of their land and its proximity to the city. Rather, they fall the first prey to the disasters brought by commercial development.…
When a Kyrgyz man decides to marry, he often abducts the woman he has chosen. Typically, he takes several friends, hires a car, stakes out his bride-to-be’s movements, and snatches her off the street. The woman is taken to the groom’s family home.
A delegation is then sent to her family to inform them of the kidnapping. The abducted woman…
In the village of Vourbira, in the Lobi country, Burkina Faso, people celebrate the second funerals of Bindute Da. Outstanding cultural and historical event, the ceremony is, beside the unchanging rituals, the scene of a collective improvisation, final meeting between past and present. In order to welcome the deceased, each of his nineteen wives prepares sorghobeer in large jars because…