The Taiwan Film Festival 2018 will take stage at India Habitat Center (IHC), New Delhi from Sept. 10 to 17, 2018 to introduce to the Indian audience five (5) award-winning Taiwanese movies and documentaries on various topics including political satire, homosexuality, ghost culture, anatomical donation and immigrant workers.
The Festival will begin with The Village of No Return (Drama/116mins) at the Stein Auditorium at 7pm Sept. 10, followed by Small Talk (Documentary/87mins) at Gulmohar Sept. 12; The Tag-Along (Fictional Horror/126mins) at the Stein Auditorium Sept. 14; The Silent Teacher (Documentary/73mins) at Gulmohar on Sept. 15; and close with The Road To Mandalay (Drama/108mins) at the Stein Auditorium Sept. 17.
All these films will be screened with English subtitles and begin at 7pm on time. Admission is free; seats are on a first-come-first-serve basis. Actual schedule is subject to last minute changes.
To add some flavour to the Festival, co-organizer Taipei Economic and Cultural Center in India (TECC) will make a lucky draw for those who come to the movies. Audience can simply drop their name cards with his or her contact number and email ID in a container provided at the entry; TECC will draw out 3 lucky winners with the prizes of ASUS Zenfone Max Pro M1 (3GB RAM/ 32GB ROM, Black or Grey) and 30 winners for Taiwanese documentary DVDs at the witness of IHC at the end of the Festival.
Below are brief introduction to each of the movies:
The Village of No Return (Stein Auditorium, 7pm, Sept. 10) - A mysterious Taoist priest arrives in a village with a device that can erase bad memories. One by one, the villagers undergo the “treatment” and become simpletons incapable of remembering the past, only slaves to the sordid desires and whims of the priest.
Small Talk (Gulmohar, 7pm, Sept. 12) - Hui-Chen is a filmmaker searching to connect with her lesbian mother Anu. The latter, a Taoist priest, is something of an enigma to the former. One day, Hui-Chen decides to sit down with Anu and discover the truth of their relationship and pave a path to her mother’s heart.
The Tag-Along (Stein Auditorium, 7pm, Sept. 14) - Yi-Chun experiences a series of inexplicable incidents while searching for Wei’s missing grandmother in the mountains. The only clue to her whereabouts is a video of the grandmother on a forest trail with a ghostly girl in a red dress ominously following behind. During the search, Wei goes missing leaving Yi-Chun to solve the mystery alone.
The Silent Teacher (Gulmohar, 7pm, Sept. 15) - The decision to donate the body of Lin family’s recently deceased matriarch to medical science is examined in detail by this documentary exploring the cultural taboos and emotional minefields associated with the practice. Life, death and frailty of the human condition are all laid bare for public dissection.
The Road To Mandalay (Stein Auditorium, 7pm, Sept. 17) - Lianqing and Guo are a couple from Myanmar who met while illegally entering Thailand. Life in the new country is not easy as undocumented workers. Lianqing has high hopes for the future and wants to legalize his residency status. But Guo is tired of life on the fringes and wishes to return home. This clash in life goals creates tensions in the relationship and threatens to doom the love.
Collaborating with the IHC, TECC believes that by screening these five top-notch movies in their respective genre, Indian audience will have a deeper understanding in Taiwan’s diversified culture and witness its natural, economical and social beauty as well as the developments in its entertainment industry.
In showing these internationally recognized Taiwanese movies such as Small Talk, Teddy Award winner for Best Documentary film at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival and The Road To Mandalay, Fedeora Award for Best Film at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival, the TECC also expects the week-long Festival can act as a suitable contact lens that would provide novel perspectives into certain significant issues notice-worthy in the contemporary world.
The Taiwan Film Festival 2018 will kick off with The Village of No Return, a commercial success and political satire, at the Stein Auditorium, India Habitat Center, New Delhi at 7pm, Sept. 10, 2018.
