The Taiwan Film Festival (TWFF) launches its second Sydney program in July, bringing 10 features and 6 short films fresh from festivals and the Taiwanese box office.
The festival opens on 25 July 2019 with Lung-Yin Lim’s debut feature OHONG VILLAGE (蚵豐村), only weeks after its debut at the Taipei Film Festival. Shot on 16mm, it follows Sheng-Ji as he returns to a small oyster-farming village and reinvents himself as an urbanite.
Another fresh pick is the Australian premiere of the stylish Nien-Tsu Hsieh film IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD SHOW (瘋狂電視台瘋電影), which is adapted from the successful comedy theatre production Crazy TV and showcases the dark side of Taiwanese TV.
The Australian premiere of Tzu-Hsuan Hung’s neo-noir THE SCOUNDRELS (狂徒) plays alongside Maren Hwang’s debut XIAO MEI (小美), while Midi Z’s NINA WU (灼人秘密) comes to use directly from the Cannes International Film Festival. There’s also a special screening of Ming-Liang Tsai’s THE RIVER (河流), the 1997 Berlin and Chicago International Film Festival winning film co-presented here with Queer Screen Australia
Documentaries include OUR YOUTH IN TAIWAN (我們的青春，在台灣), about the Sunflower movement and LOST BLACK CATS – 35th SQUADRON, about Taiwanese pilots involved in the American U-2 project to uncover China’s development of nuclear weapons in the 1960s and 1970s. Ming Liang-Tsai doesn’t classify his work YOUR FACE (你的臉) as either documentary or feature, but we can look forward to a synth score from Ryuichi Sakamoto.
The Festival closes out with THE ISLAND THAT ALL FLOW BY (川流之島), a timely film in which a middle-aged mother deals with working-class life and her son’s charge of sexual assault.
The Taiwan Film Festival runs from 25 – 28 July 2019 at Event Cinemas George Street in Sydney. You can check out the full program and buy tickets from the official site.
