TAIPEI, Taiwan -- "This edition of the festival is by no means an old wine in a new bottle," filmmaker Huang Ming-chuan (黃明川) said from the outset. Huang is the art director and founder of upcoming Chiayi International Art Doc Film Festival (嘉義國際藝術紀錄影展), and his knowledge spans from classic modern films to contemporary art documentaries.
▲圖／翻攝自中國郵報
Chiayi International Art Doc Film Festival is an expressional film festival first held in 2014 with help from Chiayi City's Cultural Affairs Bureau, who has helped organize the event to this day. Unlike many of Taiwan's film showcases, which are organized in a formulaic way, the Chiayi fest focuses on indulging the audience with an exploration of human beauty and diversity as well as the lives and perspectives of artists both commercial and abstract.
Marching into its fourth year, this year's festival is themed "Inner Treasure" (內心寶藏). Entries were divided into four smaller showcases, each centered on a topic that seeks to present the wonder of human art in a unique way.
One showcase, titled "Hard Pursuit" (硬追逐), focuses on the lives of the artists and their long road to creativity and expression. Another, titled "Precious Words of Hers" (女心聲聲處), deals with topics of feminism and gender transcendence
Unlike many festivals that screen films exploring women's issues from the perspective of physicality, the Chiayi event offers titles that deal with women's spirituality, professionalism and religious choices.
"We explore the themes of feminism and gender transcendence," said Huang. "And the beauty is, we observed that a lot of our filmmakers in the genre actually broke gender boundaries themselves. A lot of our entries in 'Precious Words of Hers' were made by men, while more physical and violent pictures were tackled by women. While we see many male directors documenting the sensual topic of gender, we also see female directors like Ho Chao-ti (賀照緹) shooting the violent 'The Gangster's God (炸神明)' and a woman filmmaker (Laura Bialis) from Israel behind the cameras for 'Rock in the Red Zone' where she was under fire when chronicling up close in the Gaza Strip military zone."
According to the filmmaker, the festival is set to screen 49 entries from international and local filmmakers. Ten of the documentaries will be making their world premieres, while 16 others will be screened for the first time in Asia. Two filmmakers from the Czech Republic will be present to talk about their films, and Bialis will be conducting a Q&A session over the internet.
"We are not just any other film festival," Huang said. "We may be small, but we feature art as our essence, which enables us to showcase artistic documentary films that are otherwise unavailable anywhere else in the Taiwanese filmmaking and festival scene."
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