The 15th edition of the Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF), held this May, served as a poignant exploration of politically engaged nonfiction cinema from across Asia, featuring a rich program of both groundbreaking new works and meticulously restored films. Since its inception in 1998, a decade after the lifting of martial law in Taiwan, TIDF has distinguished itself as a crucial platform for regional storytelling, championing independent voices and challenging dominant narratives in a landscape marked by complex geopolitical dynamics and evolving social consciousness.
A Legacy Forged in Freedom: TIDF’s Historical Significance
The establishment of the Taiwan International Documentary Festival in 1998 marked a significant turning point for documentary filmmaking in Taiwan. The island nation, having endured nearly four decades of martial law under the Kuomintang (KMT) government from 1949 to 1987, experienced a burgeoning era of independent video activism and the rise of new community media models in the post-martial law period. This environment fostered alternative structures for film production and distribution, allowing for critical perspectives previously suppressed. Globally, few festivals at the time, apart from Japan’s Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (founded in 1989), specifically championed politically engaged nonfiction from Asia. TIDF immediately filled this void, notably featuring both an Asian Visions Competition and a dedicated Taiwan Competition strand in its inaugural year, signaling its commitment to both regional and local cinematic discourse. This foundational ethos has continued to shape TIDF’s programming, positioning it as a vital institution for uncovering diverse truths and fostering cross-cultural understanding within the Asian continent and beyond.
Unveiling Suppressed Histories: The Story of Li Guang-hui
One of the most profound revelations at the 15th TIDF was the screening of Archive: Li Guang-hui (1979/2024), a meticulously compiled 30-minute work by the late renowned Taiwanese photographer Chang Chao-tang. This film, assembled from TV newsreel outtakes Chang captured while working as a photojournalist for the China Television Company (CTV) between 1975 and 1979, documents the extraordinary return of Suniuo. Known also by his Japanese name, Teruo Nakamura, and later his Mandarin name, Li Guang-hui, Suniuo was an Indigenous Amis Taiwanese soldier conscripted into the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. Dispatched to the Indonesian island of Morotai, he was discovered living in complete isolation in the jungle 30 years after the war’s conclusion, entirely unaware that the conflict had ended.
Suniuo’s miraculous reappearance in 1974 became a global sensation and was swiftly appropriated by the then-ruling KMT government in Taiwan. His story was skillfully woven into a powerful nationalist narrative celebrating the Republic of China’s triumph over the Japanese empire. Suniuo was recast as a national hero, lauded for resisting and escaping the Japanese Imperial Army, despite alternative accounts suggesting he may have simply deserted as the tide of war turned against Japan. This carefully constructed public image positioned him as a lodestar for the new Taiwan, symbolizing resilience and national pride.
Chang Chao-tang’s film offers a stark counter-narrative to this state-sponsored mythologizing. Chronologically assembled, the footage progresses from early press interviews with Suniuo’s family awaiting his return, through the elaborate spectacle of his homecoming, and tragically, to his struggle with the lung cancer that ultimately led to his death in 1979. Crucially, Chang deliberately restricts the footage to Suniuo’s highly mediated public appearances, incorporating original narration by news reporters but never allowing Suniuo himself to utter a single word. Through the numerous ceremonies staged to welcome him back into public life, Chang’s camera frequently lingers in close-up on Suniuo’s face. A particularly striking sequence captures famed Taiwanese folk singer Chen Da serenading Suniuo with a song recounting his "story" as a Ulyssean epic of return to family and nation. What initially appears as contemplation on Suniuo’s face gradually registers to the viewer as profound incomprehension, as he listens to a Mandarin folk song in a language and cultural tradition entirely alien to his Indigenous Amis heritage.
Chang’s refusal to impose any new voiceover, combined with the cumulative power of his associative montage, creates a fragmentary portrait of a man transformed into a national symbol, his personal trauma subsumed by a historical narrative he had no part in shaping. This deliberate artistic choice underscores the profound disconnect between Suniuo’s lived experience and the political agenda it was made to serve.
A Posthumous Discovery and its Implications
Remarkably, Chang Chao-tang never publicly screened Archive: Li Guang-hui. The film remained hidden in his private archives until his passing in 2024, when his son donated his extensive collection to the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI). Its discovery and subsequent screening at TIDF in 2024 are significant for several reasons. Chang Chao-tang himself was celebrated at TIDF in 2018 for his short, diaristic 8mm films, which were influenced by Theatre Quarterly (劇場), the first avant-garde postwar Taiwanese periodical that encouraged youth to forge their own artistic movements. Archive: Li Guang-hui finds Chang at a critical juncture between the experimental, constellational style of his shorts and his professional work as a photojournalist. This newly unearthed "gem" challenges the long-standing academic and popular notion that Taiwanese documentary filmmaking only truly emerged after the end of martial law in 1987, demonstrating that critical, experimental documentary practices were indeed present and developing even during the authoritarian era.
Archival Journeys: War, Colonialism, and Shifting Identities
Beyond Archive: Li Guang-hui, the festival’s archival programs further deepened the exploration of Taiwan’s complex identity. "Reel Taiwan" focused on documentaries chronicling social movements of the 1980s, offering a glimpse into the island’s nascent democratic awakening. Concurrently, "War Memories, Shifting Identities" delved into the experiences of conscripted Taiwanese soldiers during the Japanese colonial period, a chapter of history often overshadowed. These programs collectively foregrounded the hybridity of Taiwanese identity, shaped by colonial subjugation and diverse modes of collective resistance. They illuminated the island’s often-contested relationship to the Sinocentric world, brought forth long-suppressed Indigenous Amis and Tayal histories, and highlighted Taiwan’s wider archipelagic connections across the Pacific and with the United States.
This intricate web of identities was particularly evident in Asia Is One (1973) by the leftist collective NDU. The film masterfully stitches together various testimonies from postwar Taiwanese fishermen in Okinawa, Zainichi Okinawan miners on mainland Japan, and rural villagers from Tayal communities in Taiwan. Through their narratives, the film sensitively limns their varying relationships to Japanese colonialism—some expressing sharp critique, others revealing more loyal or nostalgic sentiments. The vast expanses of the sea, continually traversed by these seasonal laborers, serve as a powerful metaphor, revealing the profound heterogeneity of East Asia, an immense region constantly pulled between multiple forces of territorializing nationalisms. In an era where Taiwan’s self-governance is increasingly precarious, often framed through the competing imperial interests of the United States and China, TIDF’s deliberate attention to these layered and often contradictory local histories provides a defiantly prismatic perspective. This archival focus on local narratives resonates deeply with global struggles, a connection nowhere more evident than in the program "Palestine and Its Archiveless Archive," which frames solidarity with Palestine as an integral part of a broader continuum of anti-imperial and decolonial struggles worldwide.
The Human Scale: Urban Development and Enduring Resilience
The festival’s contemporary selections frequently centered on the profound confrontations between individuals and the inexorable march of predatory urban development. Hu Sanshou’s Xiangzidian Village: The Stage (2026), a sprawling 150-minute documentary, exemplifies this theme. Filmed over six years, the movie meticulously records the gradual transformation of a landscape, as earth and grass inexorably give way to crushed rock, dust, and finally, the flattened gray expanse of a new highway. Paradoxically, this highway becomes a stage upon which generations of village life continue to unfold.
In contrast to his previous film, Resurrection (2025), where he directly interviewed villagers, Hu Sanshou opts for a more distanced and reflective approach in Xiangzidian Village: The Stage. Assuming the role of storyteller through voiceover, he offers intimate vignettes of individual villagers framed against sustained wide shots. These wide shots serve to bind each subject to their surrounding environment, where they appear dwarfed by vast hills, towering mounds of rock, and bulldozers looming like new, formidable gods. Hu consistently 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 profound emotional force from Hu’s personal relationship with his subjects; the villagers who once watched him grow up are now the very individuals he quietly observes growing old. Each subject emerges as the center of an entire universe, held together by gingerly interlocking webs of relationships and shared history, all taking the stage again for the final, poignant act.
Given the abundance of independent Chinese documentaries that often present a rapid-fire cinéma vérité of the marginalized to an eager European circuit, Hu’s film feels distinctly patient, even meditative. Filmed over six years, it deeply mourns each elder who passed away during the extensive production process, underscoring a commitment to its subjects that transcends mere observation. In the film’s sole 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—a powerful moment of shared memory and communal solace amidst profound change.
Echoes of Resistance: Post-Protest Realities and the Pursuit of Justice
Many films showcased at TIDF were refreshingly unpretentious, even as they unflinchingly revealed real-life horrors. They often mediated their approach with a certain artistic distance, deliberately avoiding any half-hearted claim that cinema alone would "change the world." In Compact Disc (2026) and Maps of Traces (2025), filmmakers sensitively portray their subjects in the aftermath of Hong Kong’s seismic political revolt. These individuals are depicted as disillusioned by the outcomes, yet notably not apathetic, embodying a quiet endurance. Similarly, in urban-development documentaries, many of the older generation appear to plod on, still holding onto the hopes of securing the "good life." Within the specific textures of their physical and emotional worlds, these filmmakers uncover profound resilience and endurance where others might mistakenly perceive failure or mere passivity.
Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Narrative (2026) powerfully circles around the inherent quagmire at the heart of contemporary political cinema, particularly concerning trauma. The film stages a theatrical workshop with family members of the Red Shirts pro-democracy activists who were tragically killed in Bangkok during the 2010 massacre. Suwichakornpong structures the film according to three distinct workshop exercises that imitate an abstract three-act narrative. Act one requires participants to describe a memory corresponding to a primal emotion without explicitly naming that emotion. Act two facilitates a discussion with a lawyer, mediating a conversation about the future of their ongoing legal action. Finally, act three prompts participants to describe an experience for which they feel thankful. This codified narrative structure subtly exposes the conventional ways in which stories of trauma are often shaped: suffering is typically followed by a resolution, a framework designed to assuage any potential feeling of guilt on the part of the spectator. Most suggestively, during the final act, Eiko Ishibashi’s evocative score overrides the dialogue, rendering their words inaudible at the very moment the film asks them to articulate gratitude—a powerful comment on the limits of imposed narratives and the ineffability of certain experiences.
During act two, the participants are brought together to discuss their arduous fifteen-year pursuit of justice for their slain family members. The 2010 inquest, as depicted, treats each death as an isolated case, rather than acknowledging it as part of a collective tragedy. This legal strategy sends families on an exhausting cat-and-mouse chase across different military units in search of individual soldiers, thereby fragmenting violence enacted on a mass scale and preventing any comprehensive reckoning with the military state as a whole. By juxtaposing the way Thai law disaggregates a collective case with the tendency of popular representations of political trauma to center individual testimonies, Narrative profoundly exposes the impossibility of genuine individual healing without collective restitution. Suwichakornpong, however, deftly troubles the rigidity of her own imposed structure by interspersing each workshop scene with intimate glimpses from the participants’ everyday lives, moving them out of the sterile brightness of the studio and back into the private rituals of mourning. A mother retrieves a cherished notebook in which she meticulously records her dreams, filled with visits from her son. These deeply affective sequences draw the viewer back to the raw, personal root of the struggle. Yet, by continually returning to the workshops—which themselves form part of the research for Suwichakornpong’s forthcoming courtroom drama, Fiction—the filmmaker thoughtfully considers both the veracities and the inherent falsehoods of testimony: how its tenderness has been called upon, and at times manipulated, within therapeutic, legal, and filmic frameworks.
Post-Pandemic Reflections: Absurdity and Endurance in Urban Spaces
Perhaps the most memorable film of the festival similarly upended any conventional notion of resolution, transforming its own premise into an ouroboric, Beckettian walkaround. Luo Li’s Air Base (2025), by Canada-based Chinese filmmaker, is set in Wuhan in 2023, after the pandemic has ostensibly "ended" and the city tentatively, warily, returns to a new form of public life. Described by some as a city symphony, it perhaps makes more sense to view the metropolis as a sprawling stage for a motley crew of performers engaged in seemingly absurd acts. A man pretends to be a traffic operator from an overpass, issuing commands to passersby. A young woman assiduously collects recordings of sighs from strangers. Two men repeatedly fish in a man-made pond, often failing to catch anything. Another man meticulously divides fallen autumn leaves into symmetrical piles atop public city bikes or attempts to straighten the curtains of public buses.
These staged sequences evoke the same peculiar intrigue as early-2000s prank shows, primarily by provoking unscripted public reactions. Pedestrians mostly obey the impromptu traffic commands to stop. Passersby treat the young woman with suspicion, often refusing to sigh, perceiving it as a "pessimistic" and "ungrateful" action in a society striving for positivity. The man who attempts to "fix" the city’s perceived asymmetries ultimately accomplishes nothing tangible. Even a humble broom takes center stage, constantly falling on an ascending escalator, with people gingerly stepping over it to one side, watching its Sisyphean descent but doing little to intervene. These motifs recur throughout the film, spiraling into a pervasive sense of "limp time"—a suspended duration without end, stripped of conventional narrative propulsion. Such reactions capture the stark nature of interpersonal relationships in the present post-pandemic era: no one bears significant responsibility for another, and each person acquiesces to authority or absurdity with shrugs of apathy. Reality, as depicted, is not merely tired; it is profoundly exhausted.
Despite the proliferation of repeated empty gestures in Air Base, the film’s ultimate force lies in the accumulation of these subtle public responses. Repeated conversations by the lake may not yield fish, but they produce a strange form of camaraderie among the unlikely participants. Occasionally, some people sigh without prompting, a quiet, almost defiant gesture revealing an exhausted mind that nevertheless refuses to admit defeat. These films, far from collapsing with exhaustion, instead re-perform it across new permutations, finding peculiar, prickly forms that bend around the edges of the possible. They continually imagine what comes after all that we have already seen before, reaffirming TIDF’s enduring role in nurturing a global documentary landscape that embraces complexity, questions authority, and celebrates the resilient, often understated, human spirit.
