Since 2020, and supported by the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan, the Cultural Division at the Taipei Representative Office in the UK (TRO) has organised the annual Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh (TaiwanFFE), bringing the very essence in Taiwanese film to audiences across Scotland and the UK. For TaiwanFFE 2022, the show is hitting the road!
Originally held for one week in October, for its third anniversary TaiwanFFE is drastically expanding. Screenings will now run as part of a year-long series of events from April to November and be held in locations across Scotland, from Edinburgh and Glasgow to Inverness and the Orkney Islands. In order to realise this expanded program of events, TaiwanFFE 2022 will partner with a range of institutions across Scotland and the UK, such as Regional Screening Scotland, the Scottish Poetry Library, the Hong Kong Film Festival UK, and Scottish Autism. In total, TaiwanFFE 2022 aims to bring around 20 Taiwanese films to audiences in Scotland. Through this series of partnerships and collaborations, TaiwanFFE hopes to deepen its ties to the UK arts and culture industry, and to bring the magic and diversity of Taiwanese film to a wider audience than ever before.
As Chief Curator Liu Kuan-ping explains, the theme of TaiwanFFE 2022 will be ‘The (Un)usual’. In Chinese, the word 非常 feichang, commonly used to indicate ‘very’ or ‘extremely’, literally means ‘not usual’ or ‘extraordinary’. The films shown as part of TaiwanFFE 2022 will offer a range of interpretations of the (un)usual, from the avant-garde to the fantastical, as well as exploring how our notions of ‘ordinary and ‘extraordinary’ are shaped by the politics of social change, mass movements, and personal identity.
The first half of the festival will run from late March to July. Kicking off the 2022 events, the festival is collaborating with Regional Screen Scotland to bring Taiwanese film all the way to the Orkneys, Durness, and Lochinver, courtesy of 80-seat, air-conditioned mobile cinema the ‘Screen Machine’. The mobile cinema will tour northern Scotland in order to screen the Taiwanese animated short, Girl in the Water (2021).
From the 1st April, the festival will present the ‘Towards Freedom’ mini programme at Summerhall Edinburgh, in collaboration with Hong Kong Film Festival UK. Exploring the role of social movements in recent Hong Kong and Taiwan history, this programme consists of the following three films: Revolution of Our Times (Hong Kong, 2021), May You Stay Forever Young (Hong Kong, 2021) and The Price of Democracy (Taiwan, 2019). Shortly thereafter, the festival will collaborate with local charity, Scottish Autism, for a screening of Among Us (2021) on 9th April, a documentary that follows four Taiwanese art students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This event will shine a light on the challenges faced by these young men, and will also serve as a fundraiser for Scottish Autism.
On 19th May, the festival will collaborate with Scottish Poetry Library to screen Le Moulin (2015), an experimental documentary about Taiwan’s first avant-garde literary group in the 1930s, during Japanese colonial rule. The screening will be followed by a panel featuring new poetry from Scottish poet Heather H. Yeung.
As the summer holidays begin in June and July, the festival will arrange a series of kid-friendly screenings of the newly restored animated work Grandma and Her Ghosts (1998) and other animated films. These films use supernatural, fantastical elements to explore the challenges of family life and absent parents from kid’s perspective. Bringing films aimed towards younger audiences to TaiwanFFE, the festival hopes to broaden its reach to a new generation of film-viewers.
The second half of the festival will take place in October and November, with a week-long screening schedule at major cinemas in Edinburgh in October, and other large cities such as Glasgow, Inverness, Aberdeen, and Fort William, in November. Further details will be announced later in the year, as the first half of the festival draws to a close.
Chen Pin-chuan, Director of the Cultural Division at the TRO, comments that the festival’s transformation owes a lot to the challenges of the past two years of the pandemic. Working hard to develop the festival despite lockdown and Covid-19, the curatorial team were motivated to reach out to more arts institutions and charities within Scotland and the UK, establishing new dialogues and broadening the geographic reach of the festival. It is hoped that this year’s Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh will lead to future productive collaborations and bring a rich understanding of Taiwanese cinema to audiences across Scotland.
Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh 2022: https://taiwanfilmfestival.org.uk/