The 15th edition of the Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF), held in May, served as a compelling platform for exploring the vast and nuanced landscape of political nonfiction Asian cinema, presenting a meticulously curated program that featured both contemporary works and recently restored cinematic treasures. This year’s festival reaffirmed TIDF’s enduring commitment, dating back to its inception, to championing politically engaged nonfiction from the region, offering profound insights into historical narratives, societal struggles, and the multifaceted identities forged in the crucible of colonial legacies and modern challenges.
TIDF’s Legacy: A Beacon for Independent Asian Documentary
Established in 1998, a pivotal decade after the lifting of martial law in Taiwan, the Taiwan International Documentary Festival emerged during an exhilarating period for documentary filmmaking on the island. The late 1980s and 1990s witnessed a surge in independent video activism, alongside the rise of innovative community media models that offered alternative structures for film production and distribution. In this vibrant environment, TIDF quickly carved out a unique niche. While other notable festivals, such as the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (founded in 1989), already existed, there was a distinct need for a festival specifically championing politically engaged nonfiction that prioritized regional Asian cinema. TIDF addressed this gap from its inaugural event, featuring both an Asian Visions Competition and a dedicated Taiwan Competition strand, thus fostering a vital space for filmmakers to explore complex regional narratives and artistic expressions. Over the past quarter-century, TIDF has consistently upheld this mission, evolving into a globally recognized institution that not only showcases cinematic excellence but also actively contributes to the discourse on documentary ethics, historical representation, and social justice within an Asian context.
Unearthing a Hidden Gem: Archive: Li Guang-hui (1979/2024)
Among the most revelatory screenings at this year’s festival was Archive: Li Guang-hui (1979/2024), a compelling 30-minute work compiled from TV newsreel outtakes by the renowned Taiwanese photographer Chang Chao-tang. This film offers a poignant re-examination of a significant historical event, documenting the miraculous return of Suniuo, an Indigenous Amis Taiwanese soldier.
The Story of Suniuo (Teruo Nakamura/Li Guang-hui)
Suniuo, also known by his Japanese name Teruo Nakamura and later by his newly assigned Mandarin name Li Guang-hui, had been drafted into the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II and dispatched to the Indonesian island of Morotai. In an astonishing turn of events, he was discovered in the jungle 30 years after the war’s conclusion, living in complete isolation and entirely unaware that the conflict had ended. His discovery in 1974, and subsequent return to Taiwan in 1975, ignited a media frenzy and became a powerful symbol.
Upon his return, Suniuo’s narrative was swiftly appropriated and integrated into the Kuomintang (KMT) government’s nationalist rhetoric, serving to bolster the Republic of China’s triumph over the Japanese empire. He was recast as a national hero, celebrated for having purportedly resisted and escaped the Japanese Imperial Army – though historical accounts suggest he may have simply deserted as the Japanese forces faced defeat. Regardless of the precise circumstances of his desertion, Suniuo became a potent lodestar for the new Taiwan, his story manipulated to fit a predetermined political agenda that emphasized national resilience and anti-Japanese sentiment. His case was not unique; other Japanese holdouts, like Hiroo Onoda, were found in the 1970s, captivating global attention and highlighting the long shadow of World War II. However, Suniuo’s Indigenous identity and his Taiwanese origin added a layer of complexity to his story within the KMT’s Sinocentric narrative.
Chang Chao-tang’s Artistic Vision and Historical Challenge
Chang Chao-tang, who worked as a photojournalist for the China Television Company (CTV) between 1975 and 1979, meticulously assembled the footage for Archive: Li Guang-hui. The film is chronologically structured, moving from initial press interviews with Suniuo’s family anticipating his return, to the grand spectacle of his homecoming, and finally, to his personal battle with lung cancer, which ultimately led to his death in 1979.
Chang’s directorial choices are particularly striking. He deliberately restricts the footage to Suniuo’s highly mediated public appearances, incorporating original narration by news reporters, yet conspicuously omitting any direct words from Suniuo himself. This artistic decision underscores the profound disjuncture between Suniuo’s lived experience and the public narrative imposed upon him. During the numerous ceremonies staged to welcome him back into public life, Chang’s camera frequently employs close-ups that linger on Suniuo’s face. One particularly poignant sequence features the famed Taiwanese folk singer Chen Da serenading Suniuo’s "story," framing it 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 a profound incomprehension, as he listens to a Mandarin folk song in a language and cultural tradition entirely alien to his Indigenous Amis background.
Chang’s refusal to impose a new voiceover, combined with the cumulative power of associative montage, creates a fragmentary yet deeply moving portrait. It reveals a man mythologized into a national symbol, his private trauma and Indigenous identity largely subsumed by a dominant historical narrative in which he had no active hand in shaping. The film, never screened publicly during Chang’s lifetime, remained in his private archives until donated to the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI) by his son following Chang’s death in 2024. This belated public debut is significant, as Archive: Li Guang-hui finds Chang at a critical juncture between the experimental, constellational style of his earlier short films and his professional work as a photojournalist. Its very existence challenges the long-standing claim that Taiwanese documentary filmmaking only truly emerged after the end of martial law in 1987, suggesting a richer, more complex history of nonfiction cinema on the island. Chang’s earlier engagement with the avant-garde, catalyzed by the postwar Taiwanese periodical Theatre Quarterly (劇場) which encouraged youth to imagine their own avant-garde movement, provides further context to his innovative approach.
Archival Programs: Reconsidering Taiwanese Identity and Geopolitics
Beyond Archive: Li Guang-hui, the 15th TIDF featured two powerful archive programs: "Reel Taiwan," focusing on social movements in the 1980s, and "War Memories, Shifting Identities," which explored the experiences of conscripted Taiwanese soldiers during the Japanese colonial period. These programs collectively served to reconsider the hybridity of Taiwanese identity, shaped by layers of colonial subjugation and diverse modes of collective resistance.
These archival works foreground the island’s often-contested relationship to the Sinocentric world, shedding light on its long-suppressed Indigenous Amis and Tayal histories, and its wider archipelagic relations across the Pacific and with the United States. This perspective becomes particularly prescient in Asia Is One (1973) by the leftist collective NDU. The film masterfully stitches together various testimonies from postwar Taiwanese fishermen in Okinawa, Zainachi Okinawan miners on mainland Japan, and rural villagers from Tayal communities in Taiwan. Through these diverse voices, the film limns their varying relationships to Japanese colonialism—some critical, others more loyal and nostalgic. The expansive sea, continually traversed by these seasonal laborers, serves 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, frequently framed through the competing imperial interests of the US and China, the festival’s deep attention to the island’s intricate histories offers a defiantly prismatic view. This archival focus on local history resonates powerfully with global struggles, a connection 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, drawing parallels between contested territories and suppressed narratives across continents.
The Individual Against the Bulldozer: Urban Development Documentaries
A recurring theme across many films in the TIDF program centered on the stark confrontations between individuals and the relentless march of predatory urban development. The question posed implicitly and explicitly was: What can an individual do when pitted against the overwhelming force of a bulldozer?
Hu Sanshou’s Xiangzidian Village: The Stage (2026) exemplifies this theme with remarkable patience and depth. Over its 150-minute runtime, the film meticulously documents the gradual transformation of a landscape: earth and grass slowly give way to crushed rock, dust, and ultimately, the flattened gray expanse of a new highway. This highway, paradoxically, becomes a stage upon which generations of village life continue to unfold. Unlike his previous film, Resurrection (2025), where he directly interviewed villagers, Hu opts for a more distanced and reflective approach in Xiangzidian Village. Assuming the role of a storyteller through voiceover, he offers intimate vignettes of individual villagers against sustained wide shots that inextricably bind each subject to their surrounding environment. They appear dwarfed by vast hills, burgeoning mounds of rock, and bulldozers looming like new, formidable gods.
Hu consistently refers to his subjects in terms of their familial relations—identifying them as the aunt, uncle, cousin, or wife of so-and-so. Despite the formal distance he maintains, the film derives its profound emotional force from Hu’s deeply personal relationship to his subjects; the villagers who once watched him grow up are now the very individuals he quietly observes growing old, confronting an encroaching modernity. Each subject is presented as the center of an entire universe, delicately held together by gingerly interlocking webs of community and memory, and all take the stage again for the final, poignant act.
Given the abundance of independent Chinese documentaries that often present a "pic’n’mix cinéma vérité" of marginalized populations for a ravenous European festival circuit, Hu’s film feels distinctly patient and profoundly humane. Filmed over an extraordinary six-year period, it quietly mourns each elder who passed away during the production process. In the film’s only close-up, during the coda, the camera delicately pans across the faces of the villagers as they watch one of Hu’s previous films during his father’s funeral, their expressions lighting up with bursts of recognition and wonder, a testament to shared history and enduring community.
Navigating Trauma and Narrative in Political Cinema
Many works screened at the festival were refreshingly unpretentious. Even when revealing real-life horrors, they often mediated their approach with a certain artistic distance, steadfastly avoiding any half-hearted or facile claim that cinema alone would "change the world." Films like Compact Disc (2026) and Maps of Traces (2025) found their subjects in the aftermath of Hong Kong’s political revolt, portraying them as disillusioned but far from apathetic. In urban-development documentaries, many of the older generation appeared to plod on, still holding onto the hopes of securing the "good life" amidst overwhelming change. In the specific textures of their physical and emotional worlds, the filmmakers meticulously found resilience and endurance where others might have superficially imagined only failure or passivity.
Narrative (2026) by Anocha Suwichakornpong directly confronts the quagmire at the heart of contemporary political cinema and the complexities of representing trauma. She stages a theatrical workshop with family members of the Red Shirts pro-democracy activists who were tragically killed in Bangkok during the 2010 massacre. The film is rigorously structured according to three 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 features a discussion with a lawyer who mediates a conversation about the future of their legal action, highlighting the arduous pursuit of justice. Act three asks participants to describe an experience for which they feel thankful.
This codified narrative structure deliberately exposes the conventional ways in which stories of trauma are often shaped: suffering followed by a neat resolution, designed to assuage any potential feeling of guilt on the part of the spectator. Most suggestively, during the final act, Eiko Ishibashi’s evocative musical score overrides the dialogue, rendering their words inaudible at the very moment the film asks them to articulate gratitude. This artistic choice powerfully critiques the performative aspects of trauma narratives and the often-unspoken limits of such forced expressions.
During act two, the participants are brought together to discuss their fifteen-year pursuit of justice for their family members. The 2010 inquest, a deeply flawed process, treated each death as an isolated case, rather than as part of a collective tragedy. Families were thus sent on an exhausting, Kafkaesque "cat-and-mouse" chase across different military units in search of individual soldiers, effectively fragmenting violence enacted on a mass scale to prevent any comprehensive reckoning with the military state as a whole. By juxtaposing the way Thai law disaggregates a collective case with the way popular representations of political trauma tend to center individual testimonies, Narrative profoundly exposes the impossibility of individual healing without collective restitution. Suwichakornpong, however, subtly troubles the rigidity of her own imposed structure by interspersing each workshop scene with intimate glimpses 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, vividly filled with visits from her deceased son. These deeply affective sequences draw the viewer back to the root of the struggle, to the raw, personal grief. But 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 falsehoods of testimony: how its tenderness has been called upon, often manipulated, within therapeutic, legal, and filmic frameworks.
Wuhan’s Post-Pandemic Echoes: Existential Repetition in Air Base
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) is set in Wuhan in 2023, as the pandemic has officially receded, and the city slowly, warily, returns to a new form of public life. The Canada-based Chinese filmmaker’s work has been described as a "city symphony," but perhaps it makes more sense to read the metropolis as a vast, open stage for a motley crew of enigmatic performers.
A man pretends to be a traffic operator from an overpass, issuing commands to unsuspecting pedestrians. A young woman diligently collects recordings of sighs from passersby, encountering suspicion and refusal, as sighing is perceived as "pessimistic" and "ungrateful." Two men engage in a Sisyphean effort to fish in a manmade pond, often failing to catch anything. Another man meticulously divides fallen autumn leaves into symmetrical piles atop city bikes or attempts to straighten the curtains of public buses, seeking order in urban chaos. These staged sequences evoke the same peculiar intrigue as early-2000s prank shows, deliberately provoking unscripted public reactions. Pedestrians mostly obey the traffic commands; passersby treat the sigh collector with suspicion, refusing to perform the "negative" act. The man who endeavors to "fix" the city’s asymmetries ultimately accomplishes nothing tangible. Even a humble broom takes center stage, constantly falling on an ascending escalator, with people gingerly stepping to one side, watching its Sisyphean descent but doing little to intervene.
These motifs recur throughout the film, spiraling into a profound 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 contemporary moment: no one bears responsibility for another, and each person acquiesces to authority with shrugs of apathy. Reality, as depicted in Air Base, is not merely tired; it is utterly exhausted.
Despite the proliferation of repeated empty gestures in Air Base, the film’s profound force lies in the accumulation of these public responses. Repeated conversations by the lake may not yield fish, but they paradoxically produce a strange, quiet form of camaraderie. Occasionally, some individuals sigh without prompting, a subtle, almost defiant gesture revealing an exhausted mind that nonetheless refuses to admit complete defeat. Rather than collapsing with exhaustion, many of the films at TIDF, including Air Base, re-perform it across new permutations, finding peculiar, prickly forms that bend around the edges of the possible, still imagining what comes after all that we have already seen before. The festival, in its 15th iteration, thus stands as a testament to the enduring power of documentary to not only reflect but also to subtly reframe and challenge our understanding of history, identity, and the human condition in a rapidly changing world.
