Taiwan International Documentary Festival14th Taiwan International Documentary Festival: Archival Experiences Maja Korbecka August 2024 Festival Reports Issue 110 Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF) is one of the few remaining international film festivals in the Chinese-speaking world that celebrates independent documentary films from the PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong, providing a point of global exposure for the filmmakers involved in the scene. In Issue 102 of Senses of Cinema, Judith Pernin discussed the 2022 edition of TIDF from such an angle, and this year’s presence of Zhang Mengqi and a few other filmmakers from Caochangdi – a grassroots collective working in the Chinese countryside – reaffirms the support for independent filmmaking on the other side of Taiwan Strait.1 However, for me, TIDF’s highlights over the years were the screenings of rare Taiwanese films scattered across the festival program, whether in the three competitions – regional Asian Vision Competition, global International Competition and local Taiwan Competition – or in various thematic sections. This year’s selection of archival films – home movies from the 1930s, newsreel films made between the 1950s and the 1980s, music documentaries exploring local Taiwanese culture in the 1970s, and a set of short films shot on the remote Taiwanese islands in 2000 – left me even more enamoured with archival research. The films mark four distinct stages in Taiwan’s history and politics: the Japanese colonial period; the autocratic rule of the Chinese nationalist party, Kuomintang (KMT); the development of the Taiwan nativist cultural movement (bentu wenhua yundong); and the democratisation and victory of the oppositional pro-Taiwanese independence party (DPP) in the presidential elections over 20 years ago. The archival films narrate the past in fragments, which resonates with Taiwan’s history, characterised by patchwork and palimpsest. This Is Not a Film by Deng Nan-guang This year’s TIDF Taiwan Spectrum section featured a series of amateur films shot on 8mm and 9.5mm in the 1930s and the 1960s by wealthy Taiwanese people interested in photography, some pursuing it professionally. The reels document scenes of daily life giving an insight into the rapid modernisation and Westernisation of the island under the Japanese colonial regime followed by the autocratic rule of the KMT. The home movies, seemingly the epitome of the personal and the authentic in cinema, in the course of archival research, turn out to be the objects of misplacement and fiction-making. It gives space for re-editing the footage and inquiring into the agency of the film itself. In Zhe bu shi Deng Nan-guang de dianying (This Is Not a Film by Deng Nan-guang), Huang Pang-chuan and Lin Chunni take the footage donated to Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute in 1996 by the family of the renowned photographer Deng Nan-guang after his death. It was originally thought that all the materials were shot by Deng himself, but some footage, showing scenes of the daily life of a Japanese family, indicate that its author was a Japanese official stationed in Taiwan during the early 1940s. The reels were left at Deng Nan-guang’s photo studio for development but were never picked up as most Japanese residents were obliged to leave Taiwan after the war. In This Is Not a Film by Deng Nan-guang, the abandoned footage begins to speak; the filmmakers turn it into the narrator of its own story. The material is re-edited to resemble a silent film with stylised intertitles that form a monologue, from the film reel itself. This Is Not a Film by Deng Nan-guang poses a question about the authorship of ‘orphan’ films. If their owners abandoned them, many unnamed, do the films, when rediscovered, finally speak for themselves? Or is this idea of the medium’s own agency concealing the agenda with which the contemporary filmmakers re-use ‘orphan’ films? This Is Not a Film by Deng Nan-guang left me with more questions than answers, but the speculation itself enables the film to resurrect the images left for dead. Jamming with Archive: Re-coding. Chaoji zhengxiang [(Behind) Bright-Side] edited & performed by Chang Yen-tzu and Tsai NingCreative engagement with archival materials continued at the special event Jamming with Archive: Re-coding. It featured newsreels made by the state-owned Taiwan Film Culture Company between 1945 and the 1980s, re-edited to accompany the performances of six sound designers and audiovisual artists. Newsreels and educational films are often excluded from the dominant cinema history that tends to favour full-length fiction and select documentary films. In Jamming with Archive: Re-coding, newsreels were repurposed for the gallery. The screening took place in the Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, in a compound that was a former military base – the Ministry of National Defense’s Air Force command headquarters. The location is linked to the context in which the newsreels were originally made, as a tool for spreading anti-communist propaganda, used by the Chinese nationalist party (KMT) in its various campaigns aimed at modernisation and Sinicization. However, the sound designers and audiovisual artists chose not to engage too much with the historical significance of the materials they were given to re-edit. Instead, they used them to discuss the contemporary technological acceleration and popularisation of AI software. Largely, it rendered the concrete political agenda, which the newsreels are documents of, invisible. The works did not comment on contemporary methods of news reports manipulations or the present realities of the Second Cold War. They did not address the question of why the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute – a state, cultural institution – decided to re-use the newsreels now and what it might say about the current political agenda. Instead, the artists focused on formal experiments. During one performance, a balloon floated in front of the projector, adding another screen onto which the fragments of images flickered. Thus, Jamming with Archive: Re-coding offered an intervention into the history of visual culture, hoping to engage with a wider cultural inquiry. Jamming with Archive: Re-coding. Zhu ge man bu (Jogging on the Frame) edited & performed by Dean Chi-you The last section of archival films, Reel Taiwan: Floating Islands, screened a series of documentary short films focusing on the smaller islands under Taiwan’s jurisdiction.2 Made in 2000 on the eve of the oppositional Democratic Progressive Party’s victory in presidential elections, the short films drew attention to the stories taking place in the peripheries of the country. Shen Ko-shang’s 03:04 and Huang Ting-fu’s Jinsheng san jiao (Silent Delta, 2000) offer a close-up on military bases located on Penghu Islands. Daily life is dominated by waiting. Soldiers are locked in the never-ending stand-by mode, the local economy exists to meet the needs of the army. The people, the objects and the natural environment are resources at the government’s disposal. In Mazu wuying (Shadow Dancing at Ma Tsu), the filmmaker Chien Wei-ssu takes another approach. She focuses on residents of the Ma Tsu islands which, between the 1950s and the 1990s, were the epicentre of political tensions between the PRC and the U.S. over Taiwan. In 2000, the situation was moving towards normalisation as Chien interviews a young dancer who decided to return to her hometown to teach at a local elementary school. The programming of Reel Taiwan: Floating Islands comes at a significant point in time, shortly preceding PRC military drills encircling Taiwan. The program thus invites the audience to reflect on the past 20 years since the completion of those short films. Discussing the existence of Taiwan military outposts directly facing the PRC on the other side of the strait is an unwelcome but necessary reminder of the past KMT autocratic rule that largely determined the ongoing deadlock Taiwan finds itself in on the international stage. The archival films were intellectually stimulating, but the film that left the biggest impression on me was one of the titles that screened during TIDF opening night. As part of the homage to recently deceased Taiwanese photographer Chang Chao-tang, TIDF showed two of his films – Jinian, Chen Da (Homage to Chen Da) and Wang chuan jidian (The Boat-Burning Festival). The former is comprised of a set of recordings of the low-key performances of Taitung-style songs by Chen Da who, since 1925, lead the life of a wandering minstrel all over Taiwan. The sense of freedom, contentment and easiness radiates from the frames as both Chen Da and Chang Chao-tang give play to their professional skills. The experience of long-term wandering forms a parallel between Chen Da and Chang Chao-tang who, in 1968 as a 25-year-old, started to work as a photojournalist at the China Television Company and went into making newsreels and documentary series for the following 13 years. He spent this time travelling the island and documenting Taiwanese folk culture. I originally thought that, in The Boat-Burning Festival, the filmmaker would also take the position of an observer but, instead, he turned towards modernism. In 1979, Chang travelled to Sucuo Village in the south of Taiwan to record a ritual for Wang Ye, a divine emissary believed to ward off diseases and evil spirits. A bolder choice for documentary format, Chang chose to edit the images captured on site to the music of Mike Oldfield’s Ommadawn, released four years earlier. Chang Chao-tang captures the atmosphere of the place well: the smoke making the images look as if covered with a grey veil; the heat of the fire creating an illusion as if the whole environment was flickering. Procession and acts of veneration in slow motion are punctuated by dynamic editing to the rhythm of Ommadawn. Watching The Boat-Burning Festival was like finding an artefact of the long-forgotten past, not only of local communities but also of media – the heyday of MTV and music videos. The juxtaposition of music and images results in The Boat-Burning Festival‘s immense emotional load coming from the ability to carry the power of collective spiritual experience, the merging of the past and the present, tradition and modernity, local and global, familiar and foreign. It is one of those moments in which cinema connects to something universal, whether it is longing for the past and the sense of community or a fascination with spirituality and nature, or the purifying and cathartic quality of fire. The Boat-Burning Festival The Boat-Burning Festival made me vividly recall memories of attending Ghost Festival in Toucheng in Western Taiwan back in 2017, but also of times when I had to participate in Palm Sunday processions organised by a Catholic high school I attended in a provincial city in Southern Poland almost 20 years ago. The images on the screen merged with those past experiences. After the 21-minute-long film, I felt as if I awoke from a dream. I looked around the screening room to see if only I was so affected by The Boat-Burning Festival. I noticed an older Taiwanese man crying in the row behind me. I did not know if the man was friends with Chang Chao-tang; perhaps he cried mourning his loss, or perhaps it was because of something else, such as memories of past experiences or hopes shared by a Taiwanese generation growing up during and discovering local culture and the struggle for democratisation and Taiwanisation. The Boat-Burning Festival set the tone for the entire festival. In the following days, as I walked the streets of Taipei in between screenings, I could not help but hum Ommadawn and recall the images from Chang Chao-tang’s film. This year’s TIDF also narrated other stories such as locating Taiwan within the community of Southeast Asian countries, highlighting linkages established by people migrating from Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Philippines and Myanmar to Taiwan in search of better-paid jobs or Chinese-language higher education. In 2024, TIDF built a transcontinental bridge of dialogue between Taiwan and Slovakia by curating the retrospectives of two Slovak documentary filmmakers: Viera Čákanyová and Peter Kerekes. The tickets to almost all the screenings were sold out, which proves the local audience’s craving for discussion on issues happening locally as well as abroad. TIDF takes place every two years, and the 2024 edition was the first one since 2019 that allowed for the unrestrained intake of international guests.3 The atmosphere of excitement coming from transnational dialogue and bonding was felt strongly in the air. The organisers made local as well as foreign guests feel at home. The festival bar – Vinyl Decision, near Taipei’s arthouse cinema and one of TIDF’s venues, Huashan Spot – was crowded even on rainy nights. Where divisions between festivalgoers, guests and organisers at many other festivals in the region are intentionally or unintentionally upheld, TIDF enabled free-flowing exchange and community-building, which was truly exhilarating. The feeling accompanied me back to Europe and left me hoping that, in another two years at the next TIDF, the spirit and the circumstances will remain the same. Taiwan International Documentary Festival 10 – 19 May 2024 https://www.tidf.org.tw/en Endnotes Judith Pernin, “New Territories and Old Dreams of Independence – Chinese and Hong Kong documentaries at the Taiwan International Documentary Festival”, Senses of Cinema, July 2022, Issue 102. ↩ Taiwan is made up of the main island, the Penghu Archipelago which is composed of 90 islands and small islets, and several islands on the Western Coast such as Orchid Island, Green Island and Turtle Island. ↩ In May 2022, Taiwan still required hotel quarantine and PCR tests. ↩
