David on Formosa

They are Flying (飛行少年) is a documentary directed by Huang Chia-chun (黃嘉俊) about a group of 30 boys from the Faith Hope Love Youth Academy (信望愛少年學園) in Hualian who ride around Taiwan on unicycles. 
Like Island Etude it highlights some of Taiwan's beautiful scenery in the journey around the island. However, the real story here is [...]

The tenth Taipei Film Festival (台北電影節) will be held from 20 June to 6 July 2008. It features some 250 films from around the world.

In Wuchang Street in Ximending there is a special event in conjunction with the festival called the Taipei Movie Walk. The Outdoor Cinema Park has an exhibition of hand painted movie [...]

Winds of September (九降風) is a new Taiwanese film directed by Tom Shu-Yu Lin (林書宇). The movie, set in Xinzhu in 1996, focuses on a group of seven friends at high school. The film is a teenage drama much in the style of Summer's Tail and Eternal Summer which I reviewed earlier. The serious themes [...]

Last night I attended a screening of the documentary The Forbidden Team. It was organised by Amnesty International (國際特赦組織) in Taipei. The film is about the Tibetan national football team and their efforts to play their first international match against Greenland in Denmark in 2001. 
The film details the formation of the team from the [...]

Waise Azimi, the director of Standing Up 
The 2008 Urban Nomad Film Festival kicked off on Thursday night with a screening of Standing Up at Capone's Restaurant in Taipei. The documentary by Waise Azimi tracked a group of recruits in the Afghan Army going through their training. It gave some good insights into the lives of [...]

God Man Dog (流浪神狗人) is a Taiwanese film directed by Singing Chen (陳芯宜). The title of the film in Chinese translates as "Wandering God Man Dog" and the film wanders between three story lines which come to a surprising intersection near the end of the film.
The character of Yellow Bull (黃牛角) played by [...]

I saw Eternal Summer (盛夏光年) when it was released in October 2006 and recently watched it again on DVD. Summer's Tail (夏天的尾巴) was released in the cinema in Taiwan in November 2007 and I watched it for the first time on DVD. Both movies are about the lives and loves of Taiwanese teenagers. The other [...]

screenshot from Amis Hip Hop 
Amis Hip Hop (阿美嘻哈) is a documentary about the age-grade ceremony of the Amis in Dulan (都蘭), Taidong County. A version of the documentary can be downloaded from the official website. I wrote the following about it in a paper for the Culture and Ethnic Structure of Taiwan class. 
What most [...]