Deconstructing the machinery of cinema.
There seems to be a specific sub-genre of documentary film dedicated to rolling aerial vistas of landscapes. Slow drifting shots of mountains and fields, crashing oceans, lush forests, and so on. They are usually edited together with rich musical scores, often-times ones based around world music. These films can be quite pretty to watch, but ...
Written by Travis Johnson Capitalism ruins everything – that’s the message I took away from this Taiwanese slice-of-life drama from first time feature director, Chan Ching-lin*. It’s a message that seems to have resonated with the home crowd and the critical community of Taiwan; the TV movie, picking up five wins from 11 nominations at ...
Elderly widower Chin-mao (Hsiao Hou-tao) lives alone in his family house in Pingxi. When a painful accident sees him admitted into hospital, his middle-aged children begin argue over whether or not to send him to a nursing home in Taipei. Chin-mao, however, stubbornly wants to spend his final days alone in Pingxi. Dad's Suit is the ...
Manawei (Golden Horse winner Si Pangoyod) is a young boy living with his grandmother (Feng Ying-li) on Orchid Island, south of Taiwan. His father (Ou Lu) is largely absent, having left the island to work in the southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung. Whatever money his father is earning is not coming home in sufficient quantities; ...
Ren (Wang Shih-hsien) is a mid-level gang leader in Taipei's criminal underworld. One night a former friend named Jian (Collin Chou) returns home to cause trouble and gets arrested. As the police take him away, Jian warns Ren that he has a special plan to take over the city. A few years later, Jian returns ...
A disabled man lives in a decrepit house up on a hill, with only two ghosts and a shape-shifting fish for company. The Deserted is a 55-minute short feature written and directed by Taiwanese arthouse master Tsai Ming-liang, and shot by him for the first time in virtual reality. VR strikes me as a difficult medium; not ...
On the day of the 2016 Taiwan election, police find a mutilated body of a young woman in an apartment. Her naked body has been painted white, and her eyes have been cut out and removed from the scene. Four months earlier, the victim Yang Chieh (Chang Ning) moves into the same apartment - sharing ...
