Coal India is a cinematic essay on physical labour and its cyclical movements. It portrays people who work under pre-industrial conditions in the coalfields near Dhanbad, India. The film shows heavy physical labour that is increasingly invisible in our technologized 21st century.…
The documentary films not only let us travel through time but also present Kavalan and Ketagalan culturals, recording phonograph records and 16 centimeters movies which were scattered to different collection organizations in different countries and collected by the westerners and Japanese hundred years ago. The films have both recorded the images of people and tribes in detail and retraced the…
More than a hundred years ago, ancestors of the Tachen people came from coastal region of Zhejiang County to Tachen Island, after the yellow croakers.
More than forty years ago, because of the confrontation between the KMT and the communist, they came to Taiwan and become anti-communist heroes.
Thirty years ago, for the need to have better living,…
Ptasan is the most vivid totem of the Atayal culture. After the Japanese took control of Taiwan, Ptasan was banned because it was considered a barbarian act. Now, when Ptasan is nearly unseen or unheard of, one Atayal young man, Taliana Yilou, decides to give himself Ptasan. As a young man under 30 years of age, Tali does not have…
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…
DADDY & PAPA is a one hour documentary exploring the personal, cultural, and political impact of gay men who are making a decision that is at once traditional and revolutionary: to raise children themselves. Taking us inside four gay male families, DADDY & PAPA traces the day-to-day challenges and the larger, critical issues that inevitably intersect their private lives-the ambiguous…
Sangita, a dancer of Czech-Nepali origin, journeys to Kathmandu to explore how practitioners in the Himalayan Kingdom negotiate Nepal’s dance traditions in a period of rapid cultural change. In her attempts to map the current situation of dance in Kathmandu valley, she encounters her own teachers as well as younger dancers currently finding their way. Dancing Kathmandu tells stories of…
The word “music” does not exist in the Tao language, however, music and sound are indispensable in the lives of Tao people. The ever-present singing and chanting in Tao society are an integral part of their culture. Their music “does not seek to please the ears. The goal is simply to express every aspect of life through sound.”
With the…
Dead Birds is a film about the Dani, a people dwelling in the Grand Valley of the Baliem high in the mountains of West Papua. When I shot the film in 1961, the Dani had a classic Neolithic culture. They were exceptional in the way they dedicated themselves to an elaborate system of ritual warfare. Neighboring groups, separated by uncultivated…
Cepo, the estuary of Siouguluan River, is said to be the landing point where the Pangcah ancestor first stepped on Taiwan. The Makutaay Tribe here have maintained the traditional age system. The young generation will have an “upgrade” ritual every 4 years when the youngsters who work in the cities will return home for the special occasion. When the young…
Sri Lanka 1983, Jude Ratnam is five years old. On a red train, he flees the massacre of the Tamils instigated by the Pro-Sinhalese majoritarian government. Now a filmmaker, he takes the same train from South to North.
As he advances, the traces of the violence of the 26-year-old war and the one which turned the Tamil’s fight for freedom…
Miriam El Kwader, a Bedouin wedding photographer and mother of seven, lives in an unknown and neglected Negev village. Through her camera lens, she reveals the most distressing issue polygamy in Bedouin’s marriage system . This is the story of three, relatively educated and independent women, trying to survive, each in their own way in their world – a life…
The family of the great Yolngu leader Dhakiyarr Wirrpanda is searching for answers. Seventy years after his controversial murder trial and subsequent disappearance, Dhakiyarr’s body has still not been found. His descendants know that justice was not served. They want to restore what was denied to him: his honour. This is their story, told in their own words—of two laws,…
My father, Du-Ya, left the Amis tribe and went to Taipei City as a construction worker when he was an adolescent. He later returned to his hometown after he got married, and adopted fishing as his career in Shih-Ti Habor, Hualien. Fishing was his way of making a living. However, he still needed to leave home occasionally to seek labor…
Dina_Stars and Adriano_ComePizza represent the pioneer generation of YouTubers in Cuba, a country where until recently, internet access was heavily controlled by the government out of fear of freedom of information and expression. After surviving an attempted sexual assault, Dina devotes her channel to women’s rights issues. However, her political activism invites consequences when in 2021, Cuba witnesses the largest…
After working for a weather channel for two years, documentary filmmaker Huang Chi-mao picked up a camera himself and faithfully recorded bits and pieces of the Tao peoples’ lives with a camera style very close to the subject.
The sixty-one year old Lin Xin-yu and his wife of the Yeyin tribe are the main subjects in this film. Mr. Lin…
The story of how Dr. Mutulu Shakur, stepfather of Tupac Shakur, along with fellow Black Panthers and the Young Lords, combined community health with radical politics to create the first acupuncture detoxification program in America in 1973 – a visionary project eventually deemed too dangerous to exist in America.
Dreadlocks Story opens up the history of Rastas in a new light. It shows the spiritual history behind the criticized dreadlocks hairstyle and the roots of the Rastafari culture, which is entangled with the Hindu tradition in Jamaica. Although some accommodations have been made towards Rastas, the struggle against prejudice and discrimination are still prevalent.
At the intersection of Hsichih Shin-tai Rt. 5 and N. 2 highway is an aborigine village. The Amis from Huadong named this new home in Taipei “Huadong New Village.”
The youths came to the city from their hometown with dreams. At the margin where cities connect, they found place for temporary settlement. So they started their own family and lived…
Set in the high plateau of eastern Tibet, Drokpa is an intimate portrait of the lives and struggles of Tibetan nomads whose life is on the cusp of irreversible change. Richly observed daily lives and family relationships, especially those of Tamku, a teenage single mother, Dhongya, a senior nomad, and Yithan, a mother of two boys, are at once deeply…