Deconstructing the machinery of cinema.
Ying-juan (Tsai Jia-yin) is a 30 year-old woman, still living with her mother and working as a cook at her mother's child care centre. She is overweight: the children at her workplace tease her, neighbours resent and bully her, and her mother constantly harasses her to lose weight. Driven to her wit's end, unexpected support ...
A run-down Taipei cinema screens its final movie: King Hu's legendary wuxia film Dragon Inn. While the film plays the cinema's disabled cashier (Chen Shiang-chyi) slowly goes about her work, young gay men awkwardly use the theatre as a place to hook up, and the cinema itself may be populated by ghosts. Goodbye, Dragon Inn is ...
Ho Chih-wei (River Huang) lives in a Taipei apartment with his grandmother Shu-fang (Liu Yin-shang). He works as a junior real estate agent while dating his girlfriend of five years, Shen Yi-chun (Tiffany Hsu Wei-ning). His aunt Shui has gone missing, and a video of her on a mountainside walk shows a mysterious girl in ...
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; ...
