2nd Annual Taiwanese Film Festival - June 20 -22, 2008

A rare treat is available to British Columbia film buffs who enjoy Asian cinema. Taiwanese student organizers are preparing to host the 2nd Annual Taiwanese Film Festival - showcasing a medley of drama and documentary titles. The committee members, all S.F.U. or U.B.C. students, have made arrangement with the Taiwan government office in Vancouver to receive a selection of recently produced films, all of them completed between 2005 - 2007, and recipient of national awards or nominations.

The Footprints of Youth is this year's festival theme. A detailed schedule and film list is posted on the TWFF Website.

This year the students' chosen theme is “The Footprints of Youth” and their festival will offer Taiwanese films which explore contemporary or historical aspects of Taiwan youth experience. For example two contrasting works, Love's Lone Flower (drama) and Shonenko (documentary), explore the lasting pain and disruption of the Japanese occupation period which brought WW2 down upon the Taiwanese. Among its many lasting effects the war shattered the lives of countless young Formosans and split thousands of families along generational lines. From those smoking ruins of a Japanese colony arose a vigorous and wealthy industrial nation. I will attend this festival with great interest and have already begun a feature length article on one of the films and its young director.

Venue: Vancouver International Film Centre, 1181 Seymour St.

June 20 - 22. Tickets $7 each.

SHONENKO (2006). "Shonenko" is the old Japanese term for "live in boy worker". The photo shows Taiwanese boys eating in their mess hall at an aircraft factory. Promised an education in Japan, they actually built fighter planes for a Empire which was preparing its "last ditch" defences.

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