Lee Chi-Ning I. Besides using “migration stories” as its theme, “the 2nd Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival” also chose thirteen joining films into this “New Window” section. Although these 13 films have different topics, show different styles, consist of different regional cultures, from Taiwan, China, Canada, Indonesia, Ethiopia, to Australia, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands, in…
Hu Tai-li （President, TIEFF） Taiwan, in the bosom of the Pacific Ocean, has not rested peacefully in recent years. After the shock of the great earthquake on September 21, 1999, then Typhoon Nari brought the worst flood disaster in Taipei City in two centuries in mid-September 2001. The First Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival, prepared in a state…
The making of “The Oroqen” Cai Jiaqi In the 1950s, Chinese society experienced a series of socialist movements. During this period of great social transformation, the Chinese leadership initiated a survey of the social history of minority peoples throughout China. The aim was to document traditional and contemporary social attitudes of each minority taking a materialist view of…
Lin Wen-Ling French director Jean Rouch is among the directors to be presented at this year’s Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival. A prominent director of documentary films, Jean Rouch is also renowned worldwide as the founder of the Comite du Film Ethnographique at the Musee de l’Homme and the reality cinema (cinema verite) film genre that he developed…
Grass: A Nation’s Battle For Life Ma Teng-yue Although Grass: A Nation’s Battle For Life (1925) often is praised as the second most important documentary in history of film following Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, it is screened far less often than Nanook. People interested in documentaries can read about Grass in many books, but never…