放映與活動PROGRAM & EVENT
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FILM FESTIVALSMore -
TFAI PicksMoreTFAI Picks
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TFAI PicksMoreTheater of Wonders
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Special FocusMoreWhat Was BRAT Made For? – Billie Eilish x Charli XCX
This summer, Billie Eilish and Charli XCX take over TFAI's Dolby Cinema! Experience Billie's concert film Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D) directed by James Cameron. Catch the Taiwan premiere of A24's buzzy mockumentary The Moment, starring Charli XCX, plus Charli XCX: Alone Together charting her acclaimed pandemic album How I'm Feeling Now. -
Main ProgramMoreHeterodox Drifting: Flesh, Fate, and the Red Chamber of Chiu Kang-chien
Few screenwriters have reshaped the topography of Chinese-language cinema as profoundly as Chiu Kang-chien (1940–2013), a figure who remains as unforgettable as he is fiercely unclassifiable. Unlike traditional wordsmiths bound by narrative conventions, his greatness lies in his transgressive "heterodoxy"—with a poetic, uncompromising pen, he bypassed safe moralizing to pierce the chaotic, raw undercurrents of human desire and spiritual exile. Born in the isolation of Gulangyu, Xiamen, he had lived in a continuous displacement—moving to Taiwan in 1949, and pursued advanced drama studies in Hawaii. Upon his return, he co-founded Theatre Quarterly, letting in the avant-garde spirits of Jean-Luc Godard and Bertolt Brecht sweep through the Chinese cultural landscape. His sensibilities as a modern literali caught the attention of the Shaw Brothers studio. Yet, it was his exquisite, Western-educated aesthetic vision that created a historical serendipity with the pioneers of the Hong Kong New Wave—Ann Hui, Patrick Tam, Tony Au, Eddie Fong, and others, at the volatile crossroads where traditional studio infrastructure collided with postmodern thoughts. Following his arrival at Shaw Brothers in 1966, Chiu immediately began dismantling genre boundaries. His credited screenplay debut, The Bells of Death (1968), reconstituted the Spaghetti Western into a wuxia fever dream, where a late mother's copper bells transform into a motif of impending doom. By the time he partnered with Chor Yuen for Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (1972), he pushed for an unprecedented approach that weaponized the female body, they boldly unfurled a landscape of lesbian desire and ruthless psychological warfare, operating under the dark maxim that "love is more lethal than hate." As the New Wave erupted, Chiu's feminine writing decoupled itself entirely from traditional patriarchal labels. Whether navigating the crimson, tumultuous tides of the past in An Amorous Woman of Tang Dynasty (1984), where a poetess-courtesan declares sovereignty over her own flesh, or wandering the contemporary corridors of Tony Au's I Am Sorry (1989), Chiu focused on ordinary individuals with deeply flawed, complex personalities. His heterodox vision grants him the unique talent to sculpt female characters who possess rebellious souls, exercising autonomy over their bodies and fates. In the 1980s, Stanley Kwan stepped out of the television studio to spearhead the Second Wave, choosing Chiu to pen his directorial debut, Women (1985), and that opened up to a profound, decades-long creative alliance. Chiu captured the witty, exhausted dilemma of modern urbanites who crave the anchor of marriage but refuse to surrender their freedom. Their subsequent masterpiece, Love Unto Wastes (1986)—Chiu's most personally satisfying text—took a routine murder inquiry and dissolved it into an existential wasteland, revealing the undercurrents of urban vanity. At the same time, Chiu's lens never detached from modern politics. A two-time winner of Best Screenplay at the Hong Kong Film Awards, his screenplay for Ann Hui's Boat People (1982) stood as a monument to geopolitical realism, exploring the taboo of exile and totalitarianism after the Vietnam War. In the co-written Nomad (1982), harkening to Nietzschean thought, he blended bohemian hedonism and nihilism with political violence, prophesying the ultimate disillusionment of youth in this New Wave's masterpiece. For a writer so prolific, Chiu's directorial filmography remains exceptionally rare. In 2025, Singapore's Asian Film Archive completed the restoration of Dream of the Red Chamber (1977)—an enigmatic classical adaptation written and directed by Chiu that had been lost to time. Weaving popular genre tropes with a local Singaporean cast, the film offers a mesmerizing, transnational snapshot of Singapore's early independent cinema. The Institute has offered the sole surviving, heavily degraded 35mm print to this arduous project. With less than 10% of the original color remaining, it was ultimately decided to be restored in black and white, recovering tonal depth and image clarity across 1,000 hours of meticulous restoration work. Making its Taiwanese premiere in this retrospective, this half-century-old dream offers a glimpse to Chiu Kang-chien's labyrinth of desire, mortality, and the naked human soul. -
Main ProgramMoreA Crack in the Soul: Lynne Ramsay
"There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." — "Anthem" by Leonard CohenThe films of British director Lynne Ramsay are built around fractured lives and the lingering aftershocks of trauma. Rather than confronting catastrophe in its raw immediacy, she turns away from the moment of impact and works from what remains, allowing memory to seep back into the present through audiovisual fragments. Her cinema often unfolds through a sensorial landscape, rendering grief and emotional disorientation not only as a psychological state, but also lived bodily experience.She does not attempt to heal or resolve trauma in any conventional sense, but instead holds space for it. What emerges is a quiet act of repair that never fully closes the wound, where faint traces of light continue to leak through its fissures.Against the Frame: The Resilience of a MaverickRamsay grew up in a working-class family in Glasgow, Scotland, and showed an early interest in visual art. She studied still photography at Napier College in Edinburgh, and later applied to the National Film and Television School near London. At film school, she initially focused on cinematography. However, as a small-framed woman entering a male-dominated field, she was not taken seriously by some of her teachers and peers. Refusing to accept these limitations, she pushed to graduate as a director instead. Her graduation film Small Deaths (1996) attracted immediate attention, screening at Cannes and winning the Jury Prize presented by the Jury President Francis Ford Coppola.After several award-winning short films, her first feature Ratcatcher (1999) premiered in Cannes' Un Certain Regard section and was widely recognized as a striking debut. All of her subsequent features would also premiere at Cannes. Despite early recognition, Ramsay has remained a filmmaker of relatively sparse output in her career. Conflict has often shadowed her projects. Her years of work on the adaptation of the best-seller The Lovely Bones were stripped away when financiers deemed her vision insufficiently commercial, reassigning the project to Peter Jackson. Her uncompromising stance was further evident when she left Jane Got a Gun on the eve of production, refusing to alter the script's original ending. Though this cemented her reputation as "difficult," it also reflects her refusal to let her authorial voice be silenced.Ramsay resists the label of "female director," yet acknowledges how her Glaswegian accent, working-class roots, and directness often clash with industry expectations in both London and Hollywood. In one interview, she pointed to the double standard: a man's intransigence is often read as artistic integrity or even a sign of genius, while a woman's conviction is dismissed as mere "difficulty."The Poetics of Trauma: In the Realm of the SensesDespite these obstacles, Ramsay's singular audiovisual language continues to attract collaborators. While her work draws from British social realism, she inverts the focus, looking inward toward the characters' internal scars. Her characters often drift into a state of near-silence, as if language itself can no longer contain the weight of their trauma.For this reason, she abandons explanatory dialogue and psychological exposition, instead working through what scholars have described as "haptic visuality"—a cinema that engages the body as much as the eye. Color, sound, texture, breath, and sensorial rhythm become primary expressive elements, through which she constructs a tension where tenderness and violence coexist without resolution.Her films are frequently described as poetic, though not in any decorative sense. Ramsay has long regarded Bresson's Notes on the Cinematograph as foundational, absorbing his ascetic approach to actors' physical gesture, where the smallest movement of a hand can carry immense emotional weight. She also adopts his principle of disjunction between sound and image, creating associative gaps that activate the viewer's imagination: a motionless face accompanied by disquieting soundscapes, or a sudden silence or musical shift within moments of intense visual charge, generating unease and suspended meaning.This program showcases all five of Ramsay's feature films alongside two early shorts, paired with Bresson's Mouchette and a special program on her Scottish predecessor Bill Douglas. Together, these works form a constellation where coming-of-age, memory, and sensation intersect, revealing how Ramsay transcends verbal storytelling to explore the poetics of trauma. Her films do not seek to mend the broken; instead, she enters the depths of their wounds, listening to them against the deafening silence, and finding the light that still flickers within the fractured souls. Corrections and Updates Notice [ON Program Catalog] Updated on May 20th, 2026 • p.19 The year of release for Ratcatcher is 1999. [Film Rating Revision] Updated on June 5th, 2026 • Kill the Day + Morvern Callar is rated PG15 • We Need to Talk About Kevin is rated PG15 • Mouchette is rated PG12 -
Special FocusMoreA Life in Glimpses: Bill Douglas
"If you care about filmmaking, you should watch Bill Douglas. It's just the same as Stanley Kubrick or Andrei Tarkovsky... it's up there with Tarkovsky." — Lynne RamsayBill Douglas (1934–1991) was born in the mining village of Newcraighall in Scotland and came of age under the shadow of abject poverty. Born out of wedlock and raised by his grandmother in a broken home, he developed an early interest in art, deemed by his family as impractical. His path shifted during military service, where he met his lifelong friend Peter Jewell, whose influence led him to pursue performative art in London.He trained as an actor in Theatre Workshop and acted in television, but remained drawn to cinema. In 1969 he entered the London Film School, turning his childhood memories into a screenplay titled Jamie. When shown to Lindsay Anderson, Anderson immediately recognized its autobiographical nature and urged him to embrace it fully. Eventually, with support from the British Film Institute, Douglas completed his coming-of-age trilogy on a minimal budget, becoming the first Scottish filmmaker to screen at the Venice and Berlin Film Festivals. Defined by austere black-and-white imagery, static compositions, and bleak but resonant soundscapes, the trilogy captures both the cruelty and the tenderness of childhood, hailed by the Head of Production of BFI as pure visual storytelling.Working under economic constraints and refusing to compromise his artistic vision, Douglas completed only four feature films in his life. He called cinema a "palace of dreams" and "global refuge" for the soul. In later years he became fascinated with pre-cinematic devices such as the magic lantern, and the collection he built with Peter Jewell later formed the basis of a museum in his name. Writer Raymond Carver, quoting V.S. Pritchett, once defined short stories as "something glimpsed from the corner of the eye." Douglas's cinema works similarly: it captures fleeting fragments of human existence within desolate landscapes, like the transient glow of a magic lantern in the dark—ephemeral yet leaving an indelible imprint on memory. [Film Rating Revision] Updated on June 5th, 2026 • Comrades is rated PG12 -
Main ProgramMoreColine Serreau: Pure Slay
Having studied as an organist, dancer, and even a trapeze flyer, Coline Serreau’s artistic versatility has worked wonders in her multifaceted career of acting, screenwriting, and directing. Although an enthusiast of contemporary political, social, and cultural issues, Serreau’s cinematic perceptions alternatively cultivate humor as an antidote to an inevitable harsh reality. To Serreau, films can be subversive and entertaining, while inspiring reflection. Her first feature film, Why Not! (1977), shakes the French audience by amplifying undisguised bisexuality and polyamory on the big screen. Then, by leaving out the women in Three Men and a Cradle (1985) and Crisis (1992), Serreau composes a mythical comedy centered around frustrated men who, for the first time, learn to deal with their own problems; she further protests against patriarchy with the relentless Chaos (2001) in a sassy twist and turn of events. Through the fairytale-like Mama, There’s a Man in Your Bed (1989), Serreau shifts focus to racial and hierarchical concerns, sparking positivity for marginalized individuals, while an alien in The Green Planet (1996) satirically questions our sanity in living on the over-exploited Earth. Society is constantly itching to label those with strong opinions, but Coline Serreau refuses to be confined to one genre or the other. The essence of Serreau’s filmmaking had always been to convey her beliefs without categorisation, skillfully mixing tradition and innovation through various narrative forms. It’s about talking the truth, while making us laugh; it’s about slaying, despite all judgements. Corrections and Updates Notice [ON Program Catalog] Updated on May 4th, 2026 • p.10 Flower in Storm, Chaos, and Three Men and a Cradle will be shown in Cinema A; Banana Paradise and An Extraordinary Love will be shown in Cinema B. • p.25 The schedule for the main program Coline Serreau: Pure Slay is 2026.05.16–05.31. • p.32 The runtime of Chaos is 113min • p.31 The runtime of The Green Planet is 94min • The Green Planet , The Crisis ▲ Non-English language film without English subtitles. • Mama, There's a Man in Your Bed is rated PG12 -
Main ProgramMore15th Taiwan International Documentary Festival
Founded in 1998, TIDF enters its 15th edition as a vital window through which the world unfolds via documentary cinema. Growing alongside Taiwan’s democratic development, it has fostered a space for dialogue, reflection and critical inquiry. Rather than offering fixed conclusions, the festival embraces complexity and multiplicity. This year’s programmes explore archives, perception and identity, engaging audiences in an ongoing conversation where documenting, viewing and discussion intertwine to form shared memory, resist forgetting, and illuminate our collective existence, while opening new ways of seeing and understanding the world today. For more info on venues, programmes and events, please visit the festival's website: www.tidf.org.tw -
Main ProgramMoreMumei: In Memory of Nakadai Tatsuya
Mumei: In Memory of Nakadai Tatsuya The seven-decade career of Nakadai Tatsuya (1932–2025) is, in itself, half the history of Japanese cinema. Spanning the Golden Age to the contemporary era of the Japanese cinema, from Showa to Reiwa, he worked with masters including Kurosawa Akira, Kobayashi Masaki, Ichikawa Kon, Okamoto Kihachi, and Gosha Hideo, Nakadai helped shape modern Japanese cinema. The actor's singular style and extraordinary range became a touchstone for generations of actors. With his wife Miyazaki Yasuko, Nakadai founded the actor-training institute Mumeijuku, under the philosophy—Mumei, or “never forgetting one's beginnings in obscurity,” which defined both his art and life. Initiated before his passing, this retrospective presents rarely screened works of Nakadai Tatsuya in Taiwan, aiming to honor Nakadai's spirit through key works that traced his evolving screen presence. The BondlessDebuted in 1956 during the studio system's golden age, Nakadai refused exclusive contracts and instead chose to work independently across studios while maintaining an active stage career. This freedom expanded his artistic range and forged a dynamic exchange between theatre and film. The SelflessIn Kobayashi Masaki's The Human Condition I: No Greater Love, Nakadai portrays a young idealist torn between conviction and reality. At just twenty-nine, he drastically adapts his voice in Harakiri to embody the quiet desolation of an old ronin; Ichikawa Kon's Odd Obsession reveals his restrained yet simmering intensity. Under Kurosawa Akira, Nakadai assumes dual identities in Kagemusha and descends into tragic madness in Ran; in Port Arthur and Japanese's Tragedy, his disciplined minimalism leaves a profound impression. The NamelessLike forces of the wind, forest, fire, and mountain, shifting between swiftness, fierceness, or serenity, Nakadai embodied characters of strikingly different temperaments before ultimately returning to simplicity. In the documentary Nakadai Tatsuya: to Live for Acting, he leaves behind a portrait of unadorned authenticity.Nakadai approached every role with humility, memorizing his co-actors' lines and treating each performance as a new beginning. Regardless of the harsh conditions and hours of reshooting a brief appearance in Seven Samurai, his discipline earned him lasting respect. The characters Nakadai created often eclipsed the man himself—a testament to his credo: Mumei. Defining the Golden Age of Japanese cinema as a free agent, Nakadai established an unsurpassed benchmark for future actors. Though he has departed from life's stage, his "shougai gen-eki" spirit—active for life—will continue to inspire. -
Events / Special ScreeningMoreTFAI 48th Anniversary - Where are U Bingo Shop
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Special FocusMore"70 Years of Taiwanese-Language" Film Salute to the Pioneers of Taiwanese-Language Cinema (Taiyupian): Ho Chi-ming and Huaxing Movie Studio
1956 marked a widely cited starting point in periodization of Taiwanese-language cinema (Taiyupian). With Xue Pinggui and Wang Baochuan—a collaboration between Ho Chi-ming (1916–1994) and the Gongle Troupe, a Taiwanese opera (Gezai opera / Gezaixi) troupe—Taiyupian saw a surge in production. The subsequent founding of the Huaxing Movie Studio in Taichung—Taiwan’s first private film studio—symbolized a pivotal shift in Taiwan’s production landscape. Seventy years later, this program returns to Ho Chi-ming and Huaxing not simply as a commemorative gesture, but as an entry point to examine how Taiyupian responded to market demands with limited resources and the crucial role it played in the formative years of Taiwan’s film industry. The significance of Ho Chi-ming and Huaxing lies, first, in the collective memory preserved within rare surviving footage, and second, in the professional working arrangements established under tight technical constraints and market pressures—characterized by stable crews, clearer divisions of labor, and equipment procurement. From this perspective, Taiyupian history is more than a sequence of titles; it is a negotiated production system shaped by the constant push and pull between exhibition conditions, technology, and performance traditions. By maintaining this system and cultivating talent under limited conditions, these pioneers laid a visible foundation for the Taiwanese film industry. Given the limited number of extant works, we present three films as period slices for observation: The Cowardly Hero (1958) links technical ambition to popular taste through widescreen spectacle; Misty Night in Hong Kong (1967), which is released under a Taiwan-based production credit and made by Huaxing on commission, highlights Ho Chi-ming’s cross-regional collaboration with Japanese partners and The Lost Kingdom (1999) traces the translation from stage to screen, mapping the roles of voice, bodily technique, and troupe-based knowledge within the cultural substrate of Taiyupian. Furthermore, as the original Taiyu soundtrack of Xue Pinggui and Wang Baochuan remains missing, to address the loss of audiovisual materials, we present a lecture-performance, “Re-drawing the Soundscape: Tracing the Lost Taiyu Soundtrack of Xue Pinggui and Wang Baochuan.” By utilizing surviving scripts, recordings, and musical scores, we reimagine lost sounds in the absence of a complete archive. We invite you to watch—and also to listen—to catch a glimpse of the unique posture of Taiyupian as it was shaped by the multifaceted forces of market, technology, and tradition.