This year’s edition of the Syros International Film Festival (July 16-21) will dedicate a special program to Taiwanese documentary, More than the Stranger: Short Glimpses of Taiwan. The section includes 13 short films, from 1930 to the present, of distinguished Taiwanese artists, divided into two parts, Stranger#1 and Stranger#2. The experimental non-fiction presented in the small Greek island, will offer a glimpse of the historical and political landscape of Taiwan during the last 80 years, and its connection with a sense of “national” identity always complex and in flux. The program is made possible by the collaboration between the Syros festival, the Taiwan International Documentary Festival, and Taiwan Docs, a platform very actively promoting Taiwanese documentary films abroad.
Among the films screened, A Man Who Has a Camera – Parade (Llu na-ou, 1933), one of the earliest accounts on film of a religious event in the island, and Fisherwomen, a series of home movies shot between 1935 and 1941 by photographer Deng Nan-guang. There are also two more recent works that I had the chance to see in the last couple of years, Spectrum of Nostalgia (Chen Yi-chu, 2017), and Nostalgia of the Chinatown (Chen Chun-tien, 2016), an interesting meditation on memories and the disappearance of a special communal space in the city of Tainan. You can download the SIFF catalog here.
In related news, The 16th EXiS (July 24-31), held at the Korean Film Archive in Seoul, will screen 9 experimental films made in Taiwan during the 1960s, a program presented last year in California and this year in Thailand, and probably other countries as well.
Asian Docs 