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Taiwan International Doc Fest: The Island a Stage
Archive: Li Guang-hui (1979/2024) In 1998, the Taiwan International Documentary Festival held its first edition, a decade after martial law was lifted in the island nation. It was a particularly exciting moment for documentary in Taiwan: independent video activism was on the rise, and new models of community media pointed to alternative structures for production and distribution. And yet, apart from Yamagata (founded in 1989), there were not many festivals of politically engaged nonfiction that specifically championed regional Asian cinema; the inaugural TIDF featured both an Asian Visions Competition and a Taiwan Competition strand.
In its 15th edition this May, TIDF continued to explore the breadth of political nonfiction Asian cinema, across a program featuring both new and recently restored films. One of the most revelatory screenings was Archive: Li Guang-hui (1979/2024), a 30-minute work compiled from TV newsreel outtakes by renowned photographer Chang Chao-tang. Filmed while working as a photojournalist for the China Television Company (CTV) between 1975 and 1979, it documents the miraculous return of Suniuo (also known by his Japanese name, Teruo Nakamura, and his newly assigned Mandarin name, Li Guang-hui, upon his return). An Indigenous Amis Taiwanese soldier drafted into the Japanese Imperial Army and dispatched to the Indonesian island of Morotai, Suniuo was discovered in the jungle 30 years later, living in complete isolation, unaware that the war had ended. His miraculous return was swiftly folded into the KMT’s nationalist narrative of the Republic of China’s triumph over the Japanese empire. Recast as a national hero who had resisted and escaped the Japanese Imperial Army—though some accounts suggest he had simply deserted as the army began to lose the battle—Suniou became a lodestar for the new Taiwan.
Chronologically assembled, the film moves from press interviews with Suniuo’s family before their reunion to the spectacle of his homecoming, and finally to his struggle with the lung cancer that led to his death in 1979. Chang deliberately limits the footage to Suniuo’s highly mediated public appearances, which include original narration by news reporters, but never a single word uttered by Suniuo himself. Across the many ceremonies staged to welcome him back into public life, Chang’s close-ups linger on Suniuo’s face, most strikingly in a sequence in which the famed Taiwanese folk singer Chen Da serenades Suniuo’s “story” back to him as a Ulyssean epic of return to family and nation. What at first appears to be contemplation on Suniuo’s face gradually registers to the viewers as incomprehension, as he listens to a Mandarin folk song in a language and tradition completely alien to him. Chang’s refusal to impose any new voiceover is complemented by the cumulative force of the associative montage, resulting in a fragmentary portrait of a man mythologized as a national symbol, his private trauma subsumed by a historical narrative he had no hand in writing.
Chang never screened the film publicly, and it remained in his private archives until they were donated to the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI) by his son after his death in 2024. Chang was also featured in TIDF in 2018 for his short diaristic 8mm films, catalyzed by the first avant-garde postwar Taiwanese periodical, Theatre Quarterly (劇場), which encouraged the Taiwanese youth to organize and imagine their own avant-garde movement. Archives: Li Guang-hui finds Chang at a crossroads between the constellational style of his experimental shorts and his work as a photojournalist, a gem that challenges the long-standing claim that Taiwanese documentary only emerged after the end of martial law in 1987.
Both archive programs—“Reel Taiwan,” documentaries on social movements in the 1980s, and “War Memories, Shifting Identities,” which focuses on conscripted Taiwanese soldiers during the Japanese colonial period—reconsider the hybridity of Taiwanese identity produced through colonial subjugation and modes of collective resistance. These works foreground the island’s contested relationship to the Sinocentric world, its long-suppressed Indigenous Amis and Tayal histories, and its wider archipelagic relations across the Pacific and the United States. This becomes particularly prescient in Asia Is One (1973) by the leftist collective NDU, which stitches together various testimonies from postwar Taiwanese fishermen in Okinawa, Zainachi Okinawan miners on mainland Japan, and rural villagers from the Tayal communities, limning their varying relationships to Japanese colonialism—some are critical, others more loyal and nostalgic. The expanses of the sea, continually traversed by these seasonal laborers, reveal the heterogeneity of East Asia, which was continually pulled between multiple forces of territorializing nationalisms. As Taiwan’s self-governance becomes increasingly precarious—often framed through the competing imperial interests of the US and China—the festival’s attention to the island’s histories is defiantly prismatic. The archival focus on local history resonates with global struggles, nowhere more evident than in the program “Palestine and Its Archiveless Archive,” which frames solidarity with Palestine as part of a broader continuum of anti-imperial struggle.
Many films in the program center on confrontations between individuals and predatory urban development. What does an individual do when pitted against a bulldozer? Across the 150-minute runtime of Hu Sanshou’s Xiangzidian Village: The Stage (2026), earth and grass gradually give way to crushed rock, dust, and finally to the flattened gray expanse of a highway that paradoxically becomes a stage on which generations of village life continue to unfold. Rather than interview villagers directly—as in his previous film, Resurrection (2025)—Hu opts for a more distanced and reflective approach. Assuming the role of storyteller through voiceover, he offers vignettes of individual villagers against sustained wide shots that bind each corresponding subject to their surrounding environment, where they appear dwarfed by vast hills, mounds of rock, and bulldozers looming like new gods.
Hu constantly refers to his subjects in terms of their familial relations—that is the aunt, uncle, cousin, wife of so-and-so. Despite the formal distance, the film gleans its emotional force from Hu’s personal relationship to his subjects; the villagers who once watched him grow up are now the ones he quietly observes growing old. Each subject is the center of an entire universe held together by gingerly interlocking webs, and all take the stage again for the final act.
Given the abundance of independent Chinese documentaries offering up a pic’n’mix cinéma vérité of the marginalized to a ravenous European circuit, Hu’s film feels distinctly patient. Filmed over six years, it mourns each elder who has died during the production process. In the film’s only close-up, during the coda, the camera delicately pans across the villagers as they watch one of Hu’s previous films during his father’s funeral, their faces lighting up with bursts of recognition and wonder.
Many of the works I saw at the festival were refreshingly unpretentious; even as they revealed real-life horrors, they often mediated their approach with a certain distance, avoiding any half-hearted claim that cinema would “change the world.” In Compact Disc (2026) or Maps of Traces (2025), the filmmakers find their subjects in the aftermath of Hong Kong’s political revolt, disillusioned, but not apathetic. In urban-development documentaries, many of the older generation appear to plod on, still holding onto the hopes of securing the “good life.” In the specific textures of their physical and emotional worlds, the filmmakers find resilience and endurance where others might imagine failure or passivity.
Narrative (2026) by Anocha Suwichakornpong circles around the quagmire at the heart of contemporary political cinema. She stages a theatrical workshop with family members of the Red Shirts pro-democracy activists who were killed in Bangkok during the 2010 massacre, and structures the film according to three workshop exercises that imitate an abstract three-act narrative. Act one: participants describe a memory that corresponds to a primal emotion without naming the emotion. Act two: a discussion with a lawyer who mediates a conversation about the future of their legal action. Act three: participants describe an experience they feel thankful for. The codified narrative structure exposes the ways in which stories of trauma are often shaped: suffering followed by a resolution, assuaging any feeling of guilt on the part of the spectator. Most suggestively, during the final act, Eiko Ishibashi’s score overrides the dialogue, rendering their words inaudible at the very moment the film asks them to articulate gratitude.
During act two, the participants are brought together to discuss their fifteen-year pursuit of justice for their family members. The 2010 inquest treats each death as an isolated case, rather than as part of a collective tragedy. Families are thus sent on an exhausting cat-and-mouse chase across different military units in search of individual soldiers, fragmenting violence enacted on a mass scale in order to prevent any reckoning with the military state as a whole. By comparing the way Thai law disaggregates a collective case to the way that popular representations of political trauma tend to center individual testimonies, Narrative exposes the impossibility of individual healing without collective restitution. Suwichakornpong nevertheless troubles the rigidity of her own imposed structure by interspersing each workshop scene with scenes from the participants’ everyday lives, taking them out of the sterile brightness of the studio and back into the intimate rituals of mourning. A mother retrieves a notebook in which she records her dreams, filled with visits from her son. These affective sequences draw the viewer back to the root of the struggle, but by returning to the workshops—which themselves form part of the research for Suwichakornpong’s forthcoming courtroom drama, Fiction—the filmmaker considers both the veracities and the falsehoods of testimony: how its tenderness has been called upon, in therapeutic, legal, and filmic frameworks.
The most memorable film of the festival similarly upended any notion of resolution, turning its own premise into an ouroboric, Beckettian walkaround. It’s 2023 in Wuhan, the pandemic is over, and the city returns slowly, warily, to a new form of public life. Canada-based Chinese filmmaker Luo Li’s Air Base (2025) has been described as a city symphony, but perhaps it makes more sense to read the metropolis as a stage for a motley crew of performers. A man pretends to be a traffic operator from an overpass; a young woman collects recordings of sighs from passersby; two men fish in a manmade pond (often failing to catch anything); another man divides fallen autumn leaves into symmetrical piles atop city bikes, or attempts to straighten out the curtains of public buses. These staged sequences evoke the same intrigue as early-2000s prank shows by provoking unscripted public reactions: pedestrians mostly obey the traffic commands to stop; passersby treat the young woman with suspicion, refusing to sigh as it is perceived as a “pessimistic” and “ungrateful” action. The man who appears to “fix” the city’s asymmetries ultimately accomplishes nothing. Even a broom takes center stage, constantly falling on an ascending escalator, with people gingerly stepping over to one side, watching its Sisyphean descent but doing little about it. These motifs recur throughout the film, spiraling into a sense of limp time: a suspended duration without end, stripped of narrative propulsion. Such reactions capture the stark nature of interpersonal relationships in the present—no one bears responsibility for another, and each person acquiesces to authority with shrugs of apathy. Reality is not only tired; it’s exhausted.
Despite the proliferation of repeated empty gestures in Air Base, the film’s force is in the accumulation of public responses. Repeated conversations by the lake do not yield fish, but produce a strange form of camaraderie. Occasionally, some people sigh without prompting, a gesture revealing the exhausted mind that refuses to admit defeat. Not collapsing with exhaustion, but re-performing it across new permutations, many of these films find peculiar, prickly forms that bend around the edges of the possible, still imagining what comes after all that we have already seen before.
