Ho Chao-li hi a documentary Filmmaker and director. Her works have addressed a broad range of subject matter, from traditional folk music to disadvantaged groups to contemporary cultural fusion. She formerly worked as a magazine editor, newspaper and television reporter, and community-college lecturer on media and gender issues. In the 1990s, she conducted a field survey of indigenous theater and traditional culture on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, and researched child prostitution in the newly developed special economic zones of East Asia. The works of Ho Chao-ti were invited to Taiwan International Documentary Festival, Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival, Women Make Waves Film Festival in Taiwan.
This film is Taiwan’s first documentary on music contention, recording the members of the “Labor Exchange Band,” returning from the city to Meinung countryside making music. They start caring about peasant and farm village issues after the reservoir debate had declined; their music is also more matured.
Taiwan’s farm youths now are in an embarrassing situation: those to the city…
Every Lantern Festival in eastern Taiwan, a group of men strips bare above the waist, and wearing nothing but red shorts, stands on a sacred palanquin, allowing people to pound their bodies with bottlerockets, singeing their skin. They are believed to be human incarnations of the god Handan. The “Scorching of Handan” has in recent years become a major event…