ASIA

SINGER-SONGWRITER Jolin Tsai and television host Xiao S, whose real name is Dee Hsu, are among the Taiwanese celebrities to have come under fire after expressing support for Taiwanese athletes at the Olympics.

THE SOUL (緝魂) stands out among recent Taiwanese film as an effective and well-executed commercial thriller.

With Covid-19 having finally arrived in Taiwan over the summer, I guess I’m finally realizing what the rest of the world went through over the past year.

Conspiracy theories are apparently a side effect of the Delta variant in Taiwan

Building off of Taiwan’s complex relationship with intersex issues stemming from the 1950s, 2021’s "Born to Be Human" brings light to contemporary misunderstandings of intersex people and the continued medical violence they face. The film proves an emotionally harrowing look at the medicalization of the gender binary through the lens of intersex rights.

What happens when "Fifty Shades of Grey" meets Taiwan-Japan relations? Well, probably something like "Hotel Iris," a Taiwan-Japan co-production that just premiered at the 2021 Osaka Asian Film Festival.

A Review of My Missing Valentine (消失的情人節)

An Interview with Lance and Stuart Chen-Hayes About 兩個爸爸. This follows up on an interview conducted following the publication of Double Dads One Teen in English in 2019. Lance is Taiwan’s first out gay dad and their nonbinary teen, Kalani, became the first Taiwanese citizen with two father’s names on both an international birth certificate and an international marriage license

A Review of Madalena (馬達·蓮娜), a romance between two working-class immigrants to Macau from China. Ultimately, the film provides an effective, if dramatized, look at the lives of the working class as they eke out a bare existence in the shadows of the mega-casinos that Macau is best known for.

The following Taiwanese animated shorts for children were reviewed as part of the “Formosa Fantastica” section of the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival in Switzerland. The film festival will be held from July 2nd to July 10th in a hybrid format, with simultaneously live-streamed events in Neuchâtel and Taipei.

SWINGIN’ (輕鬆搖擺) aims to be a charmful, cute, and playful story, even as it touches on contemporary social issues still debated in Taiwanese society. The short film tells the story of eleven-year-old elementary schooler Qiu Qiu, who has two gay fathers, one of which is his biological father.

A Review of Last Year When the Train Passed By (去年火車經過的時候). According to director Huang Pang-chuan (黃邦銓), the motivation for shooting the short film began with a whim—he took a photo while passing by a town on train one day and later began to wonder about the inhabitants of the houses that he had photographed.

GUBUK (工寮), directed by So Yo-hen (蘇育賢), is a unique look at the experiences of “runaway” migrant workers in Taiwan, mixing fact and fiction, realism and the fantastical. As an experimental documentary that hopes to highlight the experience of migrant workers, the film is highly Brechtian.