Posts from No Man Is an Island

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.

IN TRANCE WE GAZE (恍惚與凝視的練習), directed by Singing Chen (陳芯宜), proves a nuanced, complex portrait of man’s relation to divinity in contemporary Taiwan.

LOST COURSE (迷航), a 2019 documentary covering nearly ten years of the protests in Wukan village in China, is a tour de force.

A Review of Taipei Suicide Story (安眠旅舍). The hotel is one in which guests spend one night; either they decide to kill themselves at the end of that night, or they decide to give life another chance.

A Review of "injector after NULL," Hsien-Yu Cheng’s Solo Exhibition at Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM), through July 4, 2021. A NULL pointer in computer memory points to nowhere. It often doubles as a delimiter separating the useful data from the undefined space.

NOMADLAND, a film that won Chloé Zhao an Oscar for Best Director, is a film that follows a woman named Fern who takes seasonal jobs to make ends meet as she drives across the country in her minivan after her husband’s death.

A Review of Inside the Red Brick Wall (理大圍城)

THE SHORT FILM, “Kuroshio Current,” aims to tell a story of diasporic loss framed by traditional Taiwanese folk religion.

TAKING BACK THE LEGISLATURE (佔領立法會), produced by the Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers group, is a powerful document of one of the most dramatic events of the Hong Kong protests of summer 2019.

For what it’s worth, probably more people the world over have heard of Star Wars than they have the May 4th Movement. But the May 4th Movement was a truly world-historic event, as one of the seminal moments in the founding of modern China.

Gunda is the kind of documentary film that makes cinema art, a world imbued with mystery, love, and beauty.