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 generational perception and visibility of Taiwan’s gay community, this time Mickey Chen brings on two fabulous and vivid ‘gay senior citizens’–Madame Yu and Auntie Jiang. Madame Yu and Auntie Jiang recount their touching love stories in with both humor and pathos.
“City of Memories” depicts the lives of elderly people living in a Taipei nursery home: their agony, longing and loneliness. Images of winterly Taipei, with its drizzling rain and gloomy sky, reflect these aged women’s fading mind. In the midst of all the suffering, the women’s ballad singing and story telling bring back the emotional memories of their love lives. These women are trapped in the place where dreams and reality intertwine, and retrospection is their way to hold on to the eternity of love.
“City of Memories” is the third film in the tetralogy “The Realm of Womenhood”, after “Where is My Home?” and “The Ballads of Grandmothers”.
Every Lantern Festival in eastern Taiwan, a group of men strips bare above the waist, and wearing nothing but red shorts, stands on a sacred palanquin, allowing people to pound their bodies with bottlerockets, singeing their skin. They are believed to be human incarnations of the god Handan. The “Scorching of Handan” has in recent years become a major event in eastern Taiwan – Taidong. Those who take part in the ritual have always been shrouded in mystery, and rumored to be members of the gangster underworld.
The film delves deeply into the local underworld community of Taidong..The reason these three underworld members play the role of “living Handans” is to serve the true god in heaven. Some hope to extricate themselves from the life of the Taiwanese underworld; others are learning how to enter into it. Some have worked as hit men. Some still work as strongmen collecting debts. They have all served time in prison, and have committed various crimes. Through this ritual, we can witness the rules and relationships within this small underworld community, as well as the different values that different generations hold toward popular religious beliefs.
“Chiao Wan Jan”, the children hand puppet troupe established in 1988, is sited at Ping-Deng Elementary School, a mini school just has one hundred more students, located on Yang-Ming Mount., Taipei. Tu- Deng Yueh-Sheng is a Tibetan girl who spent three years to practice and overcome language barrier, now she is on stage to be a female hand puppet performer. She and her puppets become good friends and travel around Taiwan to perform. No matter she is the leading character of the troupe or not, Yueh-Sheng says: “It’s wounderful to learn how to perform hand puppets”. There are so many interesting and amusing circumstances in this film.