Posts from No Man Is an Island

A Review of Episodes One and Two of SEQALU: Formosa 1967 (斯卡羅)

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.

When secularism is practically a religion, what does it mean to believe, be spiritual, and attempt to see beyond ourselves? Does life have no meaning beyond what we are capable of understanding?

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.

Tension between Thunberg’s genuine wishes and her being the symbol of the overall climate movement and institutions’ stubborn refusal to act is at the very core of the film. The most successful and often poignant moments of the film is for us to understand the emotional context of what Thunberg famously said in conferences, in explaining Thunberg’s frustration and anger in her speeches.

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.

"Workers' Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Strategies, Tactics, Objectives," edited by Robert Ovetz, aspires to revive the practice of “workers’ inquiry,” as seen in the works of Marx and other socialist thinkers, as a means of allowing workers to examine their material conditions for a better understanding of how they might overcome.