February 2010, the National Concert Hall staged the multimedia musical production, On The Road. It tells the story of the internationally renowned conductor, Chien Wen-Pin, searching for his childhood aboriginal nanny. One of the play’s organisers, Taiwan Colors Music (TCM), defined this work as “the first original, aboriginal musical in Taiwanese music history”. Adding new material, the director’s cut of…
Every 12 years, impassioned devotees pull a 65-feet tall unwieldy chariot in the Kathmandu Valley, its rider an enigmatic god worshipped by Hindu and Buddhist, on a months-long journey proceeded by abundant ritual and animal sacrifice. The enterprise calls for extreme cooperation and rigorous observance of ritual in the building, sanctification and pulling of the chariot. But the jatra (festival)…
In April 1961, John Kennedy is America’s new President, the Cold War heats up in Berlin and nuclear bombers are deployed from bases in arctic Canada. In Kapuivik, north Baffin Island, Noah Piugattuk’s nomadic Inuit band live and hunt by dog team as his ancestors did when he was born in 1900. When the white man known as Boss arrives…
Ophir tells the story of an extraordinary indigenous revolution for life, land and culture, opening up the path for the creation of the world’s newest nation in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. A poetic yet dramatic ode to the indelible thirst for freedom, culture and sovereignty; the film sheds light on the biggest conflict of the Pacific since WWII, revealing the…
Anais and Daisy meet a midwife, a dying profession, and have a new understand of life and death. Since then, they’ve chosen a birthing process that is differently from 99\% of the women in Taiwan.
Anais, an aromatherapist, lives a natural and holistic lifestyle and refuses modern medicine. At the local theater, she plays an expectant mother who is forced…
This is a movie about searching and losing.
Two threads intertwine and form the whole of the story. One of which is about my husband, a man from a Ji family in Muzha Village, Neimen Township. He could be a descendent of Pingpu tribe, but neither he nor his family remembers their origin. A look at a few of old…
OYATE is a film about life on Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota. It follows two families on Pine Ridge as they go about their daily activities over the course of a single summer. They attend rodeos, shoot clay pigeons, and participate in pow wows. Family members get married, have children, and celebrate the 4th of July. All the…
Paradise Bent is one of the world’s first studies of the Samoan fa’afafines: boys who are raised as girls and play an important domestic role in Samoan culture. The anthropological spotlight has shone on Samoa many times this century. But there has been no mention of fa’afafines－is it possible the anthropologists just didn’t notice them? According to the Samoans, fa’afafines…
From late November to early December in 1936, Utsurikawa Nenozo, professor of Institute of Ethnology, Imperial Taihoku University, guided his assistant Myamoto Nobuto to the Ta-ai ceremony ground in Hsinchu’s Five Finger Mountain area to investigate the Saisiyat ceremony, Pas-taai. With cameras, they documented the lively large-scale sacred events which lasted for days. Through the precious images, the people and…
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…
Path of Destiny is a documentary about a group of Sikawasay from the Amis tribe of Hualien, Taiwan, known as the people who possess gods. This fate calls upon them to maintain traditional rituals to serve the tribe, living by way of interaction with the gods. We followed Panay Mulu, who has been with them for more than 20 years,…
Today this book, A Dog of Flanders is taught in Japanese high schools, it is a classic in the UK and the States and has inspired numerous films and TV series in Japan and the States. The most important of them being the Japanese animated series of 1975 that counted 52 episodes and influenced the Japanese culture intensely. Many of…
Welcome to my mind. My name is John Cadigan, and I’m an artist with schizophrenia. “People Say I’m Crazy” is my documentary about the world inside my head. It’s a chaotic world filled with paranoia, creativity, fear and desire. A world in which I’m struggling every day, trying to know what is real and what is not
Nico is a young graphic designer who lives in Bagheria, the more populated town in the province of Palermo. Nico is also a boy strongly tied to his land. Here he learns that to discover them and to tear them to the oblivion it has been a Palermitan man, born in 1841 and died in 1916: Giuseppe Pitrè. Nico is…
No plant in the world is exotic. For the plants, we are foreign. The theme of Plant Wars concerns ‘exotic’ plants, ‘indigenous’ plants, ‘special’ plants and battles among them, as well as some of our ‘imaginations’ over the battles. Among the people in the stories, some climb the trees, some sing, some miss their deceased espouses, some live by the…
Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir! is set in a ghetto in Western India. It’s about Budhan Theatre, a group of young Chhara Tribals who are considered “born criminals.” In 2003 Dakxin, a director and playwright, was arrested on false charges. We were concerned because the Chharas face are regularly brutalized by the Police. The documentary evolved from that initiative. Dakxin…
Pomelo people live in the heart of the growing city of Hanoi, Vietnam. It is a neighbourhood where people from different rural provinces come and work. Living in the grounds of an ongoing ring road construction, they go through processes of demolition and land eviction.
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‘Promise and Unrest’ chronicles a migration story of maternal sacrifice and love labour. Separated from her daughter Gracelle at 7 months, Noemi Barredo left the Philippines for work in Malaysia to support her parents and extended family before arriving in Ireland in 2001. Filmed over a five-year period Promise and Unrest is an ethnographic portrayal of a migrant woman performing…
For the first time in history, survivors Jenerasi, Mauda, and Grace provide evidence of a story that has become a legend in Ugandan culture: women who broke the taboo of premarital sex were abandoned on a deserted island to die.
Eighty years ago, the Seediq people living high in Taiwan’s mountains rose up against the oppressive rule of the Japanese government in what went down in history as the “Wushe Incident.” The Seediq launched an attack on the Japanese in the sports meet of an elementary school. The Japanese rulers sent in the police and the armed forces to subdue…