Tamsui River Film Festival will screen 20 impressive documentaries in indoor or outdoor cinema at Douglas Lapraik & Co in the Tamsui historical zone. The admission is free!

We sincerely invite cinema lovers come join us for a refreshing and relaxing cinema weekend along with the summer breeze at the Tamsui riverside.

Date: May 4, 2018 (Fri.) to May 6, 2018 (Sun.)

Venue: Douglas Lapraik & Co. (No.316, Zhongzheng Rd., Tamsui Dist., New Taipei City)

Featured Films

Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction

Sophie Huber｜77min

An iconic actor in his intimate moments, with film clips from some of his 250 films and his own heart-breaking renditions of American folk songs.

Lensed in colour and b/w by Seamus McGarvey (Academy Award nomination 2013 for'Anna Karenina'), the film explores the actor’s enigmatic outlook on his life and his unexploited talents as a musician.

“Putting the focus on the music rather than his person helped to engage him and capture a part of him that few people have seen. We wanted to create an atmosphere that is true to Harry, moving along with him, in his mind, at his pace, rather than to follow a linear or biographical order” (Sophie Huber, director).

With excerpts from Alien, Paris Texas, The Straight Story, Missouri Breaks a.m.o. and scenes with David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Sam Shepard, Kris Kristofferson and Debbie Harry.

RiP!: A Remix Manifesto

Brett Gaylor｜86min

Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor’s feature documentary RiP: A remix manifesto explores the concept of copyright in the era of Napster, Bit Torrent and peer-to-peer file sharing. Although pop culture giants such as Muddy Waters and the Rolling Stones were able to build on past music to produce their own, the door is now closing behind them. RiP’s central protagonist is Gregg Gillis, the Pittsburgh biomedical engineer who moonlights as Girl Talk, a mash-up artist rearranging the pop charts’ DNA with his incongruous, entirely sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy?

Digital technology opens up an unprecedented global economy of ideas. RiP explores the robber barons and revolutionaries squaring off across this new frontier as the film journeys from the control rooms of Washington to the favelas of Brazil. Along the way, Gaylor interviews key figures about the complexities of intellectual property in the digital era, among them Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig, culture critic Cory Doctorow, Brazilian musician and former Minister of Cultural Affairs Gilberto Gil, and Jammie Thomas, the single mom successfully sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for illegal downloading.

A mash-up in itself, RiP is the world’s first Open Source documentary, shattering the wall between users and producers and challenging the thresholds of “fair use”.

Brett shares his raw footage at , for anyone to remix. RiP’s movie-as-mash-up method allowed these remixes to become an integral part of the film. With RiP: A remix manifesto, Gaylor and Girl Talk sound an urgent alarm and draw the lines of battle. Which side of the ideas war are you on?

Atanasoff: Father of the Computer
Mila Aung-Thwin& Daniel Cross｜46min

Most people know who invented the telephone. The light bulb. The airplane. But what about the first computer? Atanasoff: Father of the Computer tells the story of the lone inventor who fought all his life to be recognized as the originator of one of mankind's most significant inventions.

Paul
Cécile Rousset｜7min

Paul has been my neighbour for about 15 years. He's 83 years old and he’s an actor. I recorded him talking about his life and I later added animation to it. In this portrait, past and present anecdotes of his life are mixed with drama, but they are told with a simple and satirical narrative. 

KINOKI
Léo Favier Schroeter& Berger｜15min

Are you fed up with life? Do you feel bored by the crisis? Is everybody here talking about the weather?

Well then, we have got something for you!

The Franco-German filmmakers Leo Favier and Schroeter und Berger offer a portrait of a small French village where the solidarity, initiative and commitment are daily values.

Kinoki is a fictional documentary made from a collage of super 8 films between archiving the history of this village, animated illustrations and typographic animations.

It offers a humorous solutions for a better life.

Deyrout
Chloé Mazlo｜16min

Summer 2006. Paris, France.

Chloe is waiting patiently for her departure to Beirut. She has decided to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of her parents’ arrival in France by taking a road trip to Lebanon. Just as they had done to escape the war, but the other way round.

The journey is meant to allow her to discover Lebanon, and address her identity issues. Ironically, a new war breaks out a few days before her departure. Her plans are upset, but the irrational attachment she nurtures for this wounded country pushes her to leave nevertheless…

The film, while evoking Israel’s invasion of Lebanon four years ago, is about a young woman’s awakening to the world at large, and her identity quest, which is less cultural than generational. We will follow her in her mishaps and surprises, in her apparent carefreeness, to the very end of her existential journey.

The animation technique used in the film reinforces its humourous, ironical tone, despite the seriousness of its subject matter and the complexity of the Lebanese situation.

Living the Game

Takao Gotsu｜87min

In the world of computer games, there are players earning fight money as a PRO. From the game “STREET FIGHTER”, there are even professional star players who achieve great fame and money. They are sponsored by digital tool companies or beverage companies, and tours around the world to earn fight-money in the tournaments.

However, many people look down on them since they think being PRO game players is not a respected vocation. This program reveals the struggles and challenges of them in the world of video games. We will follow their life as a Pro Gamer, and how they live their new ways of life.

Adios! Madrid

Catherine Wu｜103min

Studying dance in Spain was the dream of Lian Ho. However she gave it up to return to Taiwan for a shotgun marriage. Now she is a single mother suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. In between choreography and teaching, she returns yearly to Spain for further training. Even though this doesn’t grant her any formal credentials, she continues pursuing her dreams, insisting on using the ethnicity of the Taiwanese people and familiar Taiwanese songs to portray flamingo dance that belongs truly to her people.

Having been blessed with love and acceptance from her family, she is able to love others. She holds firmly to her promise to the aboriginal children to teach them dancing every winter and summer vacations with her own finances. She could relate to her father’s early turmoil years, driving her to create moving dance dramas that resonate with the audience.

Acknowledging her own imperfections and remorseful over her frivolous youth, she fears her daughter, Xian, who shares her passion in dancing, would one day give up her dreams as well. However, having gone through her own willful years, she extends the most possible grace to Xian.

Waterlife

Kevin McMahon｜109min

“Waterlife is a stunning ode to the last great supply of fresh water on earth, the Great Lakes, immerses us in their extraordinary beauty, ecological complexity, and extreme state of distress. Under assault on all fronts by a deadly combination of industrial toxins, sewage, invasive species, climate change, and profound apathy, they are on the verge of irreversible collapse. Director Kevin McMahon navigates with fluid clarity through industrial intervention and natural splendor, from northern Lake Superior to the Atlantic Ocean, using breathtaking cinematography and CGI to show us the waters 35 million of us drink every day. Propelled by a soaring, evocative soundtrack, this eloquent poetic essay allows us to absorb hard information gracefully balanced with a visceral understanding of how we are inextricably linked to the fate of these waters, transforming the way we think and inspiring us act before it's too late.”

Squid Jigging Fishing Boat

LU Yu-Jui｜115min

Every December to January, almost a hundred squid fishing boats from Ch'ien-chen Fishing Harbor in Kaohsiung will sail from East 120 to West 60 to work at Falkland Islands in the South West Atlantic. The sailing takes 35-40 days and crew members named it “waterway.” January 1st, 2015, a 65 meter long, 11 meter wide fishing boat began its journey to Falkland island. This is a documentary about 60 crew members from south-east Asia to work far away from Taiwan.

Citizen Jane: Battle for the City

Matt Tyrnauer｜93min

In 1960 Jane Jacobs’s book The Death and Life of Great American Cities sent shockwaves through the architecture and planning worlds, with its exploration of the consequences of modern planners’ and architects’ reconfiguration of cities. Jacobs was also an activist, who was involved in many fights in mid - century New York, to stop “master builder” Robert Moses from running roughshod over the city. This film retraces the battles for the city as personified by Jacobs and Moses, as urbanization moves to the very front of the global agenda. Many of the clues for formulating solutions to the dizzying array of urban issues can be found in Jacobs’s prescient text, and a close second look at her thinking and writing about cities is very much in order. This film sets out to examine the city of today through the lens of one of its greatest champions.

1/3 Millions

CHANG Wei-chih｜30min

Two 5-meter-long pregnant tiger sharks were rescued from the fishing nets on the shore of Sansiantai in mid June of 2016. After having a C-section, 75 baby tiger sharks were given birth but only 35 were survived. The Fisheries Research Institute and local fishermen used different feeds to help them grow and go back to the sea.

When the Fisheries Research Institutes released these baby sharks, they equipped them with miniature pop-up satellite archive tags to track their lifestyles. The tag was located on the sea through the GPS transmission and the ecological mystery of these baby sharks will be unraveled soon.

The post-release becomes the local fishermen's movement for shark conservation and our ocean ecosystem. Their perspective change is one of qualitative changes.

Heavenly Messenger

LIN Tai-wei｜70min

A bird, a group of people, the warm story of how to struggle to change Taiwan that the New York Times,Agence France-Presse, Japan Times as well as China Central Television have made special report. In 2016, the young carne' story was praised as the most beautiful scenery in Taiwan. Even the Russian Siberian Times also published on the front page with headline "Thank you, people of Taiwan" to thank the warmth of Taiwanese.

This film was shot in Siberia, China and Japan to see a never appeared bird in Taiwan, and how it is to open the tide of Taiwan's environmental revival movement. Heart touching releasing on TVBS Channel 56 , July 2017. 

Grand Slam Dream

LIN Huan-wen｜31min

A group of elders with an average in 70s formed a baseball team to pursue their dream . As the oldest baseball team in Taiwan, it’s members include retired civil servants , cooks , workers , lawyers ,talent  teachers , the elders lining alone and the elders with dementia.

Although it takes courage to play such a physically demanding sport , their families support them and they support each other as well. They show us that everyone can have a dream, and it never too late to dream.

Ca fait si longtemps​​​​​

Laha Mebow｜55min

Never refuse any encounter! There are so many different kinds of persons in the world. Is it possible, that there is a group of people having similar cultural heritages and fates with us, but they are drifting in the other side of sea?

Two Taiwanese aboriginal musicians Suming and Baobu, are invited to New Caledonia (a island located in the southwest Pacific Ocean) by the director for a trip. During this voyage, they made friends with local Kanak musician, played music, lived together, and sometimes composed together. In the end, they all found the secret to innovation and to go to the world, is to re-discover their traditional culture roots.​​​​

Miracle

LU Rou-shiuan｜23min

In day, he is a delivery driver of a factory, but when it comes the date that ends with 3, 6, 9 in lunar calendar, he changes his dirty work clothe to a mottled apron with a delicate yellow dragon on it. The apron is like a mission, which carries on the last wishes of his late father. Taking over the mantle of his father, he became a psychic.

He must encounter all kind of issues which include joy, sadness and even sickness and death. Moreover, we found the dilemma and helpless of people. We want to know how can he find a way of life for those believers and how can he make the balance between being himself and as a psychic.

We Want to Get Married

HSU Ching-Lun｜65min

Who deserves to love? Who can never get married?

Qi never knows how it feels to walk because he is a muscular dystrophy patient.  He is a fortune teller but marriage is something he can never tell. What he can tell is that dating with a physically-normal girl is something he can never be wished.

Qi and his girlfriend Yi-Fang decide to get married after dating for 7 years. Preparing for the wedding, he is actually worried about Yi-Fang’s mother, who never agrees with the marriage. At the same time, Qi’s mother also opposes the marriage because she thinks Yi-Fang will not take care of Qi and is bad-tempered like a princess.

How do Qi and Yi-Fang get along with each other and deal with all these obstacles? How do they find a balance walking through the red carpet of the marriage?

(Note:  Three featured Taiwanese films,《小劇人》,《悠悠蕩蕩淡水河》, and 《謝謝妳一直都在》 are not listed above, for they do not have official English introductions)

Screening Schedule

Date	Time	Title	Length
5/4 Fri.	Indoor
	11:00	1/3 Millions Heavenly Messenger + QA	100 min
	13:40	Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction	77 min
	15:30	Living the Game 《小劇人》	117 min
	Outdoor
	18:30	Citizen Jane: Battle for the City	93 min
	20:30	《悠悠蕩蕩淡水河》	50 min

 

Date	Time	Title	Length
5/5 Sat.	Indoor
	12:00	Waterlife	109 min
	14:10	Ca fait silongtemps Atanasoff: Father of the Computer	101 min
	16:10	RiP!: A Remix Manifesto	86 min
	Outdoor
	18:30	Adios! Madrid + QA	103 min
	21:00	Paul KINOKI Deyrout	38 min

 

Date	Time	Title	Length
5/6 Sun.	Indoor
	11:00	Miracle Grand Slam Dream 《謝謝妳一直都在》	70 min
	13:00	We Want to Get Married + QA	65 min
	15:00	Squid Jigging Fishing Boat + QA	115 min

 

Additional Reading

♦ Ang Lee (李安): 'Cinema Keeps Telling Me It is About to Change'
♦ Ya-che Yang (楊雅喆): 'It’s Not Our Revenge, But Our Quiet Wishes For Them.'
♦ Love Education from Asia's Leading Actress-Director

About CNEX

10 Years, 10 Themes, 100 Chinese Documentaries, preserving contemporary cultures of Chinese Communities.