Human suffering in disasters will be the theme of the sixth Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival, scheduled for Oct. 7 to 11 in Taipei, the Taiwan Association of Visual Ethnography announced.
“In Taiwan and around the world, the past two years have been plagued by all kinds of disasters, from storms and floods to earthquakes and a nuclear crisis,” said Hu Tai-li, TIEFF chairwoman and researcher at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Ethnology.
How people survive in the wake of these catastrophes and deal with the physical and psychological aftereffects are of particular interest to this year’s event, themed around “Suffering and Rebirth,” she said.
The five-day event will feature 10 Taiwanese and 25 foreign ethnographic documentaries, selected from more than 400 submissions from around the world, as well as outstanding productions from the past two years, according to curator Futuru Tsai.
Several films will deal with different responses to and interpretations of the effects of 2009’s Typhoon Morakot on Taiwan’s aborigines, Tsai said.
Directors in focus are Lungnan Isak Fangas, a member of Taiwan’s Amis indigenous group, and U.S. anthropologist Robert Lemelson.
Both of Lungnan’s films, “Ocean Fever” and “On the Road—Behind the Scenes,” deal with the experience of urban aborigines and their struggle to present their music to the wider society in an authentic manner.
According to Tsai, Lemelson’s long-time involvement with neuroscience and its cultural relevance is crystallized in his film “The Bird Dancer,” about a person with Tourette’s syndrome in Bali, Indonesia.
The festival’s opening film, “Collected Ping-pu Memories—On Representing Kavalan and Ketagalan Voices and Images,” by Pan Chao-cheng, a Kavalan writer and director, and closing film, the Brazilian-French collaboration “Claude Levi-Strauss, Return to the Amazon,” by director-anthropologist Marcelo Fortaleza Flores, examine how different peoples are viewed by colonizers and outside researchers, respectively.
The ethnographic film festival, held every two years since 2001, will be accompanied by after-screening discussions with directors to help deepen the viewing experience of the audience, Hu said. (THN)