The Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF), a pivotal platform for politically engaged nonfiction cinema in Asia, recently concluded its 15th edition in May, offering a profound exploration of identity, memory, and resilience. Since its inception in 1998, a decade after the lifting of martial law in Taiwan, TIDF has championed independent video activism and fostered alternative models for production and distribution, making it a crucial voice alongside festivals like Yamagata in promoting regional Asian cinema. This year’s program, featuring both new and meticulously restored films, continued to solidify the festival’s reputation for presenting works that challenge dominant narratives and delve into the multifaceted experiences of the region.
TIDF’s Legacy and the Post-Martial Law Era
The establishment of the Taiwan International Documentary Festival in 1998 was not merely the launch of another film event; it marked a significant cultural and political milestone for the island nation. Following the lifting of 38 years of martial law in 1987, Taiwan experienced a burgeoning of democratic freedoms, which profoundly impacted its cultural landscape. The previously stifled independent media and artistic expressions began to flourish, creating a fertile ground for documentary filmmaking. During the martial law period, media was heavily censored, and narratives were largely controlled by the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) party, often promoting a Sinocentric view of Taiwan as the legitimate Republic of China.
The TIDF emerged from this transformative era, becoming a vital space for filmmakers to explore Taiwan’s complex identity, grapple with its colonial past, and document contemporary social issues. Its inaugural edition notably featured both an Asian Visions Competition and a Taiwan Competition strand, immediately signaling its dual commitment to fostering local talent and engaging with broader regional narratives. This dual focus has allowed TIDF to serve as a mirror reflecting Taiwan’s internal struggles and a window onto the diverse political and social realities of Asia. The festival’s continued emphasis on "politically engaged nonfiction" underscores its role not just as a cultural event but as a platform for critical discourse and social consciousness.
A Revelatory Restoration: "Archive: Li Guang-hui"
One of the most striking highlights of the 15th edition was the screening of Archive: Li Guang-hui (1979/2024), a 30-minute documentary compiled from TV newsreel outtakes by the renowned Taiwanese photographer Chang Chao-tang. This work, previously unseen by the public, offers a powerful re-examination of a pivotal moment in Taiwan’s post-WWII history through the lens of a remarkable individual.
The film documents the story of Suniuo, an Indigenous Amis Taiwanese man who, under his Japanese name Teruo Nakamura, was drafted into the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. Dispatched to the Indonesian island of Morotai, he was discovered 30 years later, in 1974, living in complete isolation, unaware the war had ended. His "miraculous return" captured global attention and, crucially, became a potent symbol for the KMT government in Taiwan. Upon his return, he was assigned the Mandarin name Li Guang-hui and swiftly integrated into a nationalist narrative celebrating the Republic of China’s triumph over the Japanese Empire. He was recast as a national hero who had resisted and escaped the Japanese Imperial Army, despite some historical accounts suggesting he may have deserted as the Japanese forces began to lose battles. This portrayal served the KMT’s agenda, positioning Suniuo as a lodestar for a new Taiwan asserting its sovereignty and identity in the Cold War era.
Chang Chao-tang, who filmed this footage between 1975 and 1979 while working as a photojournalist for the China Television Company (CTV), meticulously assembled the outtakes. The film chronologically traces Suniuo’s journey from initial press interviews with his family, through the spectacle of his homecoming ceremonies, to his eventual struggle with lung cancer, which led to his death in 1979. Chang’s directorial choice to limit the footage exclusively to Suniuo’s highly mediated public appearances is critical. The film incorporates original news reporter narrations but pointedly includes not a single word uttered by Suniuo himself.
This deliberate silence amplifies the film’s profound critique of the state-controlled narrative. During various public ceremonies, Chang’s close-ups linger on Suniuo’s face, particularly in a poignant sequence where famed Taiwanese folk singer Chen Da serenades him with a song narrating his "story" as a Ulyssean epic of return. What initially appears as contemplation on Suniuo’s face gradually reveals itself as incomprehension to the viewer, as he listens to a Mandarin folk song in a language and tradition entirely alien to his Indigenous Amis background. Chang’s refusal to impose a new voiceover, combined with the cumulative force of associative montage, crafts 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.
Archive: Li Guang-hui remained in Chang Chao-tang’s private archives, never publicly screened, until his son donated them to the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI) after Chang’s death in 2024. Its rediscovery and screening challenge the long-standing claim that Taiwanese documentary filmmaking only truly emerged after the end of martial law in 1987, demonstrating that critical, experimental work was indeed being produced even under restrictive conditions. Chang, also recognized at TIDF in 2018 for his diaristic 8mm films influenced by the avant-garde periodical Theatre Quarterly, stands at a unique crossroads in this film, blending his experimental sensibilities with his photojournalistic observations.
Reconsidering Taiwanese Identity and Archipelagic Histories
Beyond Archive: Li Guang-hui, the TIDF’s 15th edition featured two significant archive programs: "Reel Taiwan," focusing on social movements of the 1980s, and "War Memories, Shifting Identities," which explored the experiences of conscripted Taiwanese soldiers during the Japanese colonial period. These programs collectively aimed to reconsider the hybridity of Taiwanese identity, shaped by layers of colonial subjugation and diverse modes of collective resistance.
The festival’s curatorial vision foregrounded Taiwan’s complex relationship to the Sinocentric world, shedding light on its long-suppressed Indigenous Amis and Tayal histories, and exploring its broader archipelagic connections across the Pacific and with the United States. This prismatic approach to identity is particularly prescient given Taiwan’s increasingly precarious self-governance, often caught between the competing imperial interests of the US and China.
A notable film in this context was Asia Is One (1973) by the leftist collective NDU. This documentary stitches together various testimonies from postwar Taiwanese fishermen in Okinawa, Zainichi Okinawan miners on mainland Japan, and rural villagers from the Tayal communities. The film subtly limns their varying relationships to Japanese colonialism—some critical, others more loyal and nostalgic—revealing the profound heterogeneity of East Asia. The recurring motif of the sea, continually traversed by these seasonal laborers, underscores a fluid, interconnected region continually pulled between multiple forces of territorializing nationalisms. By focusing on such local histories, TIDF draws parallels with global struggles, most powerfully articulated in its program "Palestine and Its Archiveless Archive," which frames solidarity with Palestine as part of a broader continuum of anti-imperial struggle.
Confronting Predatory Urban Development
Many films in the TIDF program centered on the stark confrontations between individuals and the relentless march of predatory urban development—a ubiquitous theme across rapidly modernizing Asian societies. The question posed repeatedly, "What does an individual do when pitted against a bulldozer?" resonated deeply.
Hu Sanshou’s 150-minute epic, Xiangzidian Village: The Stage (2026), offered a poignant meditation on this theme. Filmed over six years, it documents the gradual transformation of a rural landscape, where earth and grass progressively yield to crushed rock, dust, and finally, the flattened gray expanse of a highway. Paradoxically, this new infrastructure becomes a stage upon which generations of village life continue to unfold. Unlike his previous film, Resurrection (2025), where he directly interviewed villagers, Hu adopted a more distanced and reflective approach in Xiangzidian Village: The Stage. He assumes the role of storyteller through voiceover, offering vignettes of individual villagers against sustained wide shots that bind each subject to their surrounding environment. The villagers appear dwarfed by vast hills, mounds of rock, and bulldozers that loom like new gods, embodying the overwhelming scale of change.
Hu consistently refers to his subjects by their familial relations—"that is the aunt, uncle, cousin, wife of so-and-so." This familial framing, despite the formal distance, lends the film its emotional weight, stemming from Hu’s personal connection to his subjects; the villagers who once watched him grow up are now the ones he quietly observes growing old. Each subject is presented as the center of an entire universe, held together by delicately interlocking webs of relationships, all taking the stage for the final, inexorable act of transformation.
In a region where independent Chinese documentaries often present a rapid-fire cinéma vérité of the marginalized for eager European circuits, Hu’s film stands out for its distinct patience. Filmed over six years, it implicitly mourns each elder who passed away during the production process. The film’s only close-up, occurring in the coda, is particularly moving: 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 testament to the enduring power of shared memory and community.
Navigating Political Trauma and Disillusionment
The festival also featured films that explored the aftermath of political upheavals, particularly in Hong Kong and Thailand, highlighting themes of disillusionment and resilience. Films like Compact Disc (2026) and Maps of Traces (2025) found their subjects in the wake of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests, portraying individuals who, though disillusioned, were not apathetic. Similarly, in urban-development documentaries, many older generations were depicted as plodding on, still clinging to hopes of securing the "good life." These filmmakers, by meticulously documenting the specific textures of physical and emotional worlds, found resilience and endurance where others might perceive failure or passivity. The festival’s programming suggested that even in the face of real-life horrors, a certain mediated distance in cinematic approach could avoid facile claims that cinema would "change the world," instead focusing on revealing profound human truths.
Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Narrative (2026) critically circled the quagmire at the heart of contemporary political cinema, particularly concerning the representation of trauma. The film stages a theatrical workshop with family members of the Red Shirts pro-democracy activists who were killed in Bangkok during the 2010 massacre. Suwichakornpong structures the film according to three abstract workshop exercises, mimicking a three-act narrative. Act one: participants describe a memory corresponding to a primal emotion without naming it. Act two: a discussion with a lawyer mediating a conversation about the future of their legal action. Act three: participants describe an experience for which they feel thankful.
This codified narrative structure deliberately exposes how stories of trauma are often shaped into conventional arcs of suffering followed by resolution, often to assuage spectator guilt. Most suggestively, during the final act, Eiko Ishibashi’s score overrides the dialogue, rendering the participants’ words inaudible at the very moment the film asks them to articulate gratitude, a powerful comment on the silencing of genuine experience within imposed structures.
During act two, the participants discuss their fifteen-year pursuit of justice. The 2010 inquest treated each death as an isolated case, fragmenting violence enacted on a mass scale to prevent any reckoning with the military state as a whole. Families were sent on an exhausting "cat-and-mouse" chase across different military units in search of individual soldiers. By comparing this legal disaggregation of a collective case to how popular representations of political trauma tend to center individual testimonies, Narrative exposes the impossibility of individual healing without collective restitution. Suwichakornpong, however, troubles the rigidity of her own imposed structure by interspersing workshop scenes with intimate glimpses into the participants’ everyday lives and rituals of mourning. A mother retrieves a notebook filled with dreams of her son, drawing the viewer back to the raw root of the struggle. By returning to the workshops, which also form part of the research for Suwichakornpong’s forthcoming courtroom drama, Fiction, the filmmaker considers both the veracities and falsehoods of testimony, exploring how its tenderness has been invoked across therapeutic, legal, and filmic frameworks.
Post-Pandemic Realities and Existential Reflections
The festival’s most memorable film, Luo Li’s Air Base (2025), similarly upended any notion of resolution, transforming its own premise into an ouroboric, Beckettian "walkaround." Set in Wuhan in 2023, as the city slowly and warily returns to a new form of public life after the pandemic, the Canada-based Chinese filmmaker presents the metropolis not as a city symphony, but as a stage for a motley crew of performers engaged in repetitive, often futile, actions.
A man pretends to be a traffic operator from an overpass, directing pedestrians; a young woman collects recordings of sighs from passersby; two men repeatedly fish in a manmade pond, often catching nothing; another man meticulously divides fallen autumn leaves into symmetrical piles atop city bikes or attempts to straighten the curtains of public buses. These staged sequences evoke the intrigue of early-2000s prank shows by provoking unscripted public reactions: pedestrians mostly obey the arbitrary traffic commands; passersby treat the young woman with suspicion, refusing to sigh as it is perceived as a "pessimistic" and "ungrateful" action in a society often pressured towards positive public displays. The man attempting to "fix" the city’s asymmetries ultimately accomplishes nothing concrete. Even a broom takes center stage, constantly falling on an ascending escalator, with people gingerly stepping aside, watching its Sisyphean descent but doing little to intervene.
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, where personal responsibility for others often seems absent, and acquiescence to authority is met with shrugs of apathy. Reality, as depicted, is not merely tired; it’s exhausted.
Despite the proliferation of repeated empty gestures in Air Base, the film’s profound force lies in the accumulation of public responses. Repeated conversations by the lake may not yield fish, but they produce a strange form of camaraderie. Occasionally, some people sigh without prompting, a gesture revealing an exhausted mind that refuses to admit defeat entirely. These films, far from collapsing with exhaustion, 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.
Conclusion: The Enduring Power of Documentary
The 15th Taiwan International Documentary Festival reaffirmed its crucial role in the global documentary landscape. By delving into archives, revisiting suppressed histories, and meticulously documenting contemporary social and political struggles across Asia, TIDF continues to offer a vital space for critical engagement. From the intricate re-examination of nationalist narratives in Archive: Li Guang-hui to the existential reflections on post-pandemic urban life in Air Base, the festival showcased a diverse array of cinematic approaches. These films, often refreshingly unpretentious, avoided grand pronouncements, instead focusing on the resilience and endurance found in the specific textures of individual and collective lives. In an increasingly complex and contested world, TIDF remains a beacon, illuminating the nuanced realities of Asia and fostering a deeper understanding of shared human experiences through the enduring power of nonfiction cinema.
