放映與活動PROGRAM & EVENT
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FILM FESTIVALSMore -
TFAI PicksMoreTFAI Picks
Classic Restorations. Rare Screenings. Not to Be Missed!Handpicked every month by the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute. -
TFAI PicksMoreTheater of Wonders
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Main ProgramMoreNew International Restorations
The "New International Restorations" program enters its third year of scouting global film festivals to curate a selection of classic, rare, and ill-fated films that once slipped through the cracks of time. Through the efforts of film archives and restoration institutions worldwide, dormant images flow once more across the screen, granting cinema a second life. Spanning two months, the program presents 17 programs that bridge the silent-era through the 1990s. Two spectacular live cine-concerts with brand-new scores will accompany the world's oldest animated feature, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), and an assembly of the silent era comedy masters aims to haunt the theater with laughter. Following the traces of three Taiwanese restored titles by TFAI—Love Never Ceases (1962), The Game They Called Sex (1987), and Vive L'Amour (1994)—the selection reflects distinctive interpretations of their respective eras. Meanwhile, the home video Life Continued (1966) captures an authentic Taipei, preserving the city's 1960s footprints. These international restorations feature unfamiliar landscapes that utilize cinema as a universal language to shatter cultural frameworks and tell stories of humanity. Centering on African-American independent pioneer Charles Burnett, this spotlight presents four restored works brought back to the big screen after years of hardship and dedication, offering a profound gaze into the African American experience. Jan Troell's 1970s Swedish masterpieces, The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972), star legends Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann, depicting the hardships and hopes of pioneering experiences with an intimate yet epic scope. Indian pioneer Ritwik Ghatak's Pathetic Fallacy (1958) humanizes a car in a seemingly absurd premise that harbors profound national sentiments. Iranian New Wave master Dariush Mehrjui's The Cycle (1976) exposes the brutal reality of poverty, while Idrissa Ouédraogo's The Law (1990) delivers a tragic, striking challenge to collective discipline. Shifting from communal consciousness to personal desire, the Turkish art-house gem Time to Love (1965) and Robert Bresson's long-lost romance Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971) boldly navigate unspoken desires within unconventional relationships. Lastly, Thelma & Louise (1991) showcase the untamed audacity of the 1990s. Once submerged in history, these films return with their respective testimonies. Inside the darkened theater, we walk alongside these historical souls, gazing at the present with a "new" perspective on "old" cinema. -
Events / Special ScreeningMore2026 World Day for Audiovisual Heritage
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Special FocusMoreForest Pathfinding: ARTQUAKE in Autumn × TFAI
The ARTQUAKE in Autumn 2026 takes "Forest Pathfinding" as its theme, asking how we might orient ourselves amid the uncertainties of our time. When the world feels like a forest shrouded in mist, how do we retrace our paths, recover obscured memories, and move forward together? Extending this theme beyond the stage, TFAI joins the festival with a special film program, bringing cinema and live performance into dialogue.Echoing the festival's interest in labor, displacement, historical memory and human connection, the program brings together four films from different periods and places, each following people who have left familiar ground.Nomadland follows a woman who, after losing her home in the wake of the financial crisis, finds a new way of life on the road. In The Company of Strangers, a group of elderly women share stories and memories in an imagined wilderness. Alice in the Cities traces an unexpected bond between a middle-aged man and a young girl during a journey through homecoming. In Landscape in the Mist, two siblings set out to find their father, their journey evoking the lingering trauma of a Greece shaped by civil war and dictatorship.The forest may be daunting, but the search need not be solitary. In getting lost, we may find ourselves; in those we meet along the way, we may find our bearings. What remains are the roads we have taken, the memories we choose to carry, and the people who have walked beside us.Co-organized by: -
Special FocusMoreSensory Ethnography Lab Selected Films
Founded at Harvard University in 2006, the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) works through audiovisual media to merge sensory aesthetics with ethnographic practice, marking a fertile intersection of visual ethnography, documentary and contemporary art. Departing from documentary traditions centred on verbal explanation and visual dominance, SEL prioritises perception over interpretation, condensing ambiguous lived experience into sound and image to explore ineffable yet profound facets of reality. This program revisits the creative breadth of the SEL and invites contemporary audiences to reconsider cinema not only as something to be seen, but as something to be sensed and experienced. -
FILM FESTIVALSMoreZero-Hour Visions: The Moving Worlds of Taiyupian
Zero Hour: Another Way of Looking Back After World War II, Taiwan entered a period of transition. Mandarin policy was not yet fully implemented, Taiwanese remained widely used, and the film industry lacked capital and stable infrastructure. Film stock, equipment, and processing depended on outside supply even as demand rapidly emerged. We use "zero hour" for this moment, when rules were still unwritten and film production had not been confined to a single path. Within this zero hour, Taiwanese-language cinema (Taiyupian) used limited resources to bring varied stories to the screen. Through their own language, audiences encountered modern life and a wider world. "Zero-Hour Visions" names this act of looking and dreaming amid an unsettled order. Seventy years later, Taiyupian remains obscured by impressions of improvisation, crudity, and obsolescence. What survives includes films, fragments, trailers, and versions in different languages. Once reassembled, and juxtaposed, their identities become uncertain and familiar assumptions loosen. A contemporary "zero hour" emerges when inherited understandings no longer explain what lies before us. Following the Taiwanese term bāng—with its overlapping senses of looking, dreaming, and longing—this program revisits Taiyupian and traces relations obscured by established narratives. Seeing Worlds in Motion Taiyupian was produced and circulated through the movement of people, media, and technology. Opera performers, radio singers, foreign filmmakers from elsewhere, theaters, and the recording industry intersected, while stories and performances traveled across regions and media. The Sentimental, directed by Yuasa Namio and starring singer Jin Mei, brought cross-border talent into Taiwan's production environment. Goodbye Seventeen combines Taiwanese dialogue, Mandarin songs, and Western popular music; its pools, dance halls, and cafés carry youthful restlessness and desire, resonating with contemporaneous New Wave cinema elsewhere. Taiyupian also transformed diverse genres. Opium War reworked a Japanese wartime narrative, made world history speak in Taiwanese, and inserted it into Taiwan's postwar anti-communist context. Just to See You Once turns Gothic romance into a family nightmare. The Elegant Mr. Hu uses Ai-A-Tsai's comic body and a master-servant reversal to unsettle class order. The Wandering Umbrella Mender builds a migrant community from debt, labor, and mutual aid, while The Humiliated turns three women's journey to Taipei into a landscape of work, money, bodies, and gendered power. With limited budgets and technology, these films imagined elsewhere while registering their era's desires and anxieties. Seeing Borders Shift Taiyupian and Hong Kong Amoy-dialect cinema were distinct, yet linguistic proximity and overlapping markets connected them within Southeast Asian networks. Peach Blossom Village, financed by Li Linqiu and made in Hong Kong, reflects Amoy cinema's turn toward stars, song, and urban consumption. Advertisement Beauty integrates modern songs and advertising, while Kamikaze Yaro: Mahiru no Ketto (Kamikaze Man: Duel at Noon) brought Bai Lan and several Taiyupian actors into a Taiwan–Japan production. "Assembling Taiyu" juxtaposes agricultural educational films with fragments from Flying Pedicab to ask how Taiyupian emerged within postwar visual regimes. The surviving version of The Sentimental is in Mandarin, while Taiyu survives only in the trailer. When a Taiyupian film no longer speaks Taiyu, what still defines its identity and memory? Longing through Absence Seventy years later, we encounter images and sounds shaped by loss, rediscovery, preservation, and reassembly. Today's "looking" is also longing born from absence: a hope for forms of viewing not yet established, and for films to generate new relations through their joins and fractures. In those years audiences sat looking toward the screen, and Taiyupian looked toward the world. Today we look toward Taiyupian again—a world in which emotions and memories continue to speak and move. Corrections and Updates Notice [Film Rating Revision] Updated on September 3rd, 2026 • Goodbye Seventeen is rated PG12 • The Sentimental is rated PG -
Main ProgramMoreHouse of Terror: Anatomies of the Contemporary Uncanny
When looking at visceral fluids, organic decay, and primitive folk rituals, have you ever wondered what truly creates fear within the human psyche? Is it visual disgust, the rejection of death, or the challenge of witnessing something outside the margins of normalcy? Sigmund Freud defines "the Uncanny" (Unheimliche) as that which occurs when what is most familiar undergoes an unsettling psychological displacement, explaining why domestic settings in cinema can turn into our greatest nightmares. Julia Kristeva identifies the true site of horror as the collapse of the boundary between the self and the other, the human and the non-human, a somatic crisis provoked when the body is punctured by its own internal filth and foreign taboos. Furthermore, spanning the post-WWII era to the 21st century, modernization and the explosion of technology have constantly broken down our imagination of the boundaries between 'self and non-self.’ The post-WWII era marks a surge in humanity's obsession with the future, yielding works depicting outer space and the unknown. As Apollo 11 touched down on the moon in 1969, it unleashed further imaginations while challenging the dominance of Earth. Decades later, the 21st century witnesses the birth of the first iPhone, entirely changing the communication patterns of the human race. Today, fears of overdevelopment, ecological crises, and the ability to replicate or outperform the human brain pose ethical and existential challenges. In times as such, what troubles our understanding of self? "House of Terror: Anatomies of the Contemporary Uncanny" chronicles a journey contributed by contemporary auteurs, from primitive desires to visceral folklore toward a futuristic fear of technological uncertainty. This evolution begins with Lamb, Suspiria, and Three... Extremes: Dumplings, where boundaries of species, history, and flesh collapse into pastoral nightmares, folk rituals, and the taboo consumption of our own kind. The terror turns structural in Us and Sinners, as civilization is shattered by vengeful class doppelgängers and gothic ancestral curses. Finally, the journey crosses into a digital void. In Infinity Pool and Ex Machina, the human form is stripped of its soul—first replicated as a commodity, and ultimately discarded for the cold architecture of an unknowable synthetic intelligence. When human form is distorted, we are forced to face: what remains under our skins? -
FILM FESTIVALSMoreLee Hsing and Taiwanese-Language Cinema (Taiyupian)
Lee Hsing is most often remembered for his achievements in Mandarin-language cinema. In the 1950s, Taiyupian, the Taiwanese-language cinema, flourished in Taiwan, forming a highly dynamic field of film production. Working within this environment, Lee Hsing developed his craft through practice, gradually shaping his methods and artistic vision. Between 1958 and 1963, he directed 12 Taiyupian features. Seen today, these films were not merely apprentice works before his Mandarin-language period. Rather, they reveal how postwar Taiwanese cinema took shape across different languages, genres, and cultural influences. In this sense, Taiyupian was not a closed or purely local form, but an open production space marked by continual borrowing and hybridization. This program presents four films as four paths into the formation of Lee Hsing's early film practice. Two Friends and The Royal Society show his keen grasp of popular performance and paired-character structures: comic duos, mistaken identities, cross-dressing, and genre borrowing give these films an energy quite different from his later Mandarin-language works. Good Neighbors is often regarded as a key turning point in his move toward Mandarin cinema and is frequently discussed in terms of ethnic reconciliation. Yet what makes it especially interesting is the way Lee turns everyday negotiations over family life, marriage, work, and language into the very rhythm of comedy. The only Mandarin-language title in this selection, Our Neighbor, does not mark a complete break from Lee Hsing's Taiyupian period. Rather, it can be seen as an important attempt to redirect the plebeian perspective and practical experience he had accumulated in Taiyupian toward an urban realist style. Through these four works, we can see that the director later canonized as a major figure in Mandarin-language cinema was also deeply shaped by Taiyupian as a site of experimentation, negotiation, and formation. -
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. Corrections and Updates Notice [Screening Timetable Revision] Updated on July 12, 2026• Billie Eilish - Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D) *2D version: The July 11 screening was cancelled due to Typhoon Bavi. The screening has been rescheduled to July 24 (Fri) at 19:30 PM. Original tickets remain valid for admission. Full refunds are available until July 31, 2026 for those unable to attend due to the schedule change.• Charli XCX: Alone Together: The July 11 screening was cancelled due to Typhoon Bavi. Full refunds are available until July 31, 2026. -
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. Corrections and Updates Notice [Screening Timetable Revision] Updated on July 12, 2026• Dream of the Red Chamber: The July 11 screening was cancelled due to Typhoon Bavi. The screening and post-screening talk have been rescheduled to 11:30 AM, July 19 (Sun). Guest speaker Tee Pow Chew (Senior Archivist, Asian Film Archive) will join the discussion online. Original tickets remain valid for admission. Full refunds are available until July 31, 2026 for those unable to attend due to the schedule change.• Love unto Wastes: The July 11 screening was cancelled due to Typhoon Bavi. Full refunds are available until July 31, 2026.