Singer Fran was invited to perform at the Taiwan Film Festival UK & Nordic when it was held in Taiwan in late 2021. (photo by Kent Chuang)
 

Lee Pei-jing, a wheelchair-using singer who has been working hard to regain control of her legs, and Chang Feng, a debonair actor who is nearly 100 years old, quietly present their own stories in filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang’s heart-wrenchingly beautiful long takes. Performing a song called “Intim­ate Lover,” singer Fran’s soft and mesmerizing voice ripples across the theater. Staff from Yoyomei Foto Shop set up a vintage studio, using an old-style film camera to take portraits of audience members. They remind us that photos taken this way cannot be deleted: “When we press the shutter button in a particular place and at a particular time, it feels as if we’re making a decision in life.”

Organized by the TFF team, these images were shown in Tainan in December 2021. In her closing remarks, the TFF’s executive director, Niu, said: “We’re home at last. We’ve brought the essence of participatory cinema back to our homeland, Taiwan.” In addition to being responsible for the film screenings, chief technology officer Sora Yeh set up a three-channel interactive video installation that enabled the audience to participate. She also created a crowdfunding campaign to garner financial support from Taiwanese filmgoers.

Beginning in London

The TFF was inaugurated in London in 2019. In that year alone, tickets to as many as 62 screenings were sold, and nearly 7000 people attended, 70% of whom had not seen any Taiwanese film before. That year the TFF traveled to Iceland, becoming the first Asian film festival there to require attendees to buy tickets. The success suggests that Taiwanese films are marketable overseas.

TFF founder Aephie Chen is based in London. Being in a different time zone, she answers our video call at 6 a.m. GMT. Spotting the green leaves shining in the afternoon sun on our side, she sighs: “I haven’t visited Taiwan for a long time because of Covid!”

Chen’s father, a mechanical engineer, had to live and work in different countries, and he began to bring her with him when she was four, taking her to more than 20 countries. It was through the stories her father told her, as well as through books and films, that Chen learned about her native Taiwan and tried to alleviate her own homesickness. But it was when she dis­covered that many people didn’t know anything about the island that the idea of organizing a film festival occurred to her—a festival that would bring Taiwan’s stories to the wider world.
 

When the TFF returned to Taiwan in 2021, it received warm responses from Taiwanese filmgoers. (photo by Kent Chuang)
 

Presenting Taiwan’s diversity

To curate the TFF, in 2018 Chen came back to Taiwan, where she watched more than 400 films. Ideas began to coalesce: the TFF would be a five-year project, with its headquarters in the UK, and would be staged in a different Nordic country each year. Through a them­atic approach, Chen hoped that the TFF would help audiences in the UK and the Nordic countries learn more about Taiwan.

The inaugural festival explored the theme of “aller­gens” (i.e., politically or socially sensitive topics), and the selected films shed light on issues such as indigenous rights, homosexuality, homelessness, and Taiwan’s martial law era. Owing to their sensitive subjects, many of these films couldn’t have been produced or released elsewhere in the Chinese-speaking world. They represented the diversity of modern Taiwan, a place that celebrates freedom of speech.

Chen also collaborated with Tate Modern to create a “virtual reality cinema,” where Tsai Ming-liang’s VR film The Deserted provided a new kind of cinematic experi­ence. During the inaugural festival, 13 film­makers, including Tsai, Singing Chen, Wei Te-sheng, and Huang Hsin-yao, arrived to share their experiences. Taiwanese films suddenly became the talk of the town, in London as well as in Iceland.

The filmmakers featured at the festival all demonstrated Taiwan’s creative energy. Chen tells us that Taiwan and Iceland share many subtle similarities, both being small island countries. However, while Iceland provides a backdrop to famous epic movies and tele­vision dramas such as Star Wars and Game of Thrones, locally produced Icelandic films tend to be low-budget ones. In Taiwan, on the other hand, Wei Te-sheng was able to produce the magnificent Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale with a budget of NT$500 million.

For her part, Singing Chen broke stereotypes in Euro­pean film criticism by proving that there are dedic­ated female filmmakers in Taiwan. Her documentary The Walkers tells the story of the choreographer Lin Lee-chen and Lin’s troupe, Legend Lin Dance Theatre. Ten years in the making, The Walkers bears witness to the Taiwanese filmmaker’s perseverance and tenacity.

The second edition of the TFF examined Taiwan’s “wounds,” focusing on environmental consciousness and pro-democracy movements. Aephie Chen wanted to show her audience that Taiwan, as well as Britain, was a pioneer in these two global issues. The festival coincided with the outbreak of Covid-19 in the UK, but surprisingly, 70% of the tickets were sold. Collaborating with Tate Modern again that year, Chen showed films by Chen Chieh-jen and Ke Chin-yuan, enlisted Chen Chieh-jen to give masterclasses, and invited Extinc­tion Rebellion for a Q&A session. The program also included performances by musicians Maxwell Sterling and Kenichi Iwasa, along with book discussions. In March 2020, almost immediately after Part 1 of the fest­ival, London went into lockdown because of Covid.

Norway 2022

This year the TFF will take place in Norway. Due to the pandemic, it will probably have to be postponed until June and July. Aiming this time to trace out the “shape of togetherness,” Aephie Chen wants to promote the image of Taiwan as a “land of dreams.” She will be inviting Huang Ming-chuan, an independent filmmaker who won a National Award for Arts in 2021, to share his experiences.

In 2023 the TFF plans to travel to Denmark—a hub of Nordic film and television culture—to celebrate Taiwan’s emerging filmmakers. Currently Chen is also seeking to collaborate with a Swedish video streaming platform to show works of major Taiwanese film­makers, along with panel discussions. The Finnish edition of the TFF is provisionally dedicated to Taiwanese documentaries, putting locally crafted visual stories in global contexts.

By obtaining and retaining the support of Taiwanese filmgoers, and through crowdfunding, the TFF hopes to gather enough resources to carry on using films to tell Taiwan’s stories in the UK and the Nordic countries.

For more pictures, please click《Telling Our Stories in Europe: Taiwan Film Festival UK & Nordic》