This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Women Make Waves International Film Festival (臺灣國際女性影展), which has promoted and nourished countless women filmmakers from around the world. The REEL TAIWAN program, presented by the Asian Film & Media Initiative at the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, joins the celebrations this fall by screening five fictional, experimental and documentary films by female filmmakers from Taiwan; multiple post-screening talks with the filmmakers will also be held.
The event also provides the special occasion for a “homecoming” reunion of several filmmakers who studied at Tisch School of the Arts before they launched their fruitful careers as filmmakers, curators, critics, and educators. The films presented in the program include Of East and West(高飛) by She-wei CHOU(周旭薇), Spring Cactus(真情狂愛) by Yushan HUANG(黃玉珊), Fresh Kill(鮮殺) by Shu Lea Cheang(鄭淑麗), God, Man, Dog(流浪神狗人) by Singing Chen(陳芯宜), and Come Home, My Child(愛子歸來) by Jasmine Chinghui LEE(李靖惠).
In Of East and West, the protagonist Gao Fei, played by renowned director Ang Lee, is an energetic young man from Taiwan who wants to give himself a best shot of life in New York yet encounters a series of miscalculations and unfortunate surprises. Spring Cactus, based on the true story of the Buddhist Tzu-Chi Foundation volunteer Chen Ai-lan, is a candid portrait of vulnerable young women in the Taiwan society undergoing drastic social and economic changes, exuding a raw neo-realist energy shared by Taiwan New Cinema. Fresh Kill is a lethal satire swimming through a torrent of toxic multinational treachery, telling the story of two young lesbian parents in New York caught up in a global exchange of industrial waste via contaminated sushi.
God, Man, Dog, on the other hand, is a rhapsody of Gods, men, and dogs down and out together when a meandering truck full of gods gets mixed up with a cast of outcasts whose lives gradually entwine with each other. Come Home, My Child is a documentary about how Mama Yang, who immigrated to New York from Taiwan at the age of sixty, has corresponded with inmates in New York’s prison system for more than two decades with the transformative power of love.
REEL TAIWAN takes place at the Michelson Theater from November 17 to 19, 2023. The event is free and open to the public; RSVP required. For more information, please visit:
https://tisch.nyu.edu/cinema-studies/events/fall-2023/reel-taiwan