Best Taiwanese documentary movies

From New York City to the farmlands of the Midwest, there are 50,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S., yet one dish in particular has conquered the American culinary landscape with a force befitting its military moniker—“General Tso’s Chicken.” But who was General Tso and how did this dish become so ubiquitous? Ian Cheney’s delightfully insightful documentary charts the history of Chinese Americans through the surprising origins of this sticky, sweet, just-spicy-enough dish that we’ve adopted as our own.

17 riders with avarage age 81 decide to follow the dream of their youth and start their journey to ride around Taiwan island.

With Taiwan remaining in the grip of martial law in 1982, a group of filmmakers from that country set out to establish a cultural identity through cinema and to share it with the world. This engaging documentary looks at the movement's legacy.

The first and only Taiwanese player for the New York Yankees, Chien-Ming Wang held many titles: American League Wins Leader, World Series Champion, Olympian, Time 100 Most Influential, and The Pride of Taiwan. He had it all - until a 2008 injury forever altered the course of his career. Late Life: The Chien-Ming Wang Story - named after the late sinking action on his signature pitch - follows the rise and fall of the international icon as he fights his way back into the Major Leagues through endless rehab programs and lengthy stints away from home, carrying the weight of the world on his battered shoulder. A poignant and intimate account of Wang’s steadfast quest, Late Life tells the story of a man who is unwilling to give up and unable to let go.

What do you think of when you think of a grain of rice? Let It Be is a documentary that records the daily labor and lives of three elderly rice farmers in Tainan County’s Houbi Township. In the heart of Taiwan’s rice-producing country, they have passed their days shedding a bead of sweat to match each grain of rice. The film depicts their lifestyles which have changed little over the last half-century. Observing their toil at work and the way they go about their lives allows the viewer to appreciate the wisdom that imbues their lives and the fascinating dynamics of their relationships with each other, their animals, the gods, the weather, and the land. Between the vastness of the heavens and the joys and sorrows of the earth and its inhabitants, each farmer fulfills his unique destiny.

In 2019, the night in Hong Kong was still in fascinating beauty and the landscape of everyday life was gradually changing. Travelling the streets, Tsai Ming-liang documented the city's rhythm and ambience, along with an overpass.

With unprecedented access to Taiwan's sitting head of state, director Vanessa Hope investigates the election and tenure of Tsai Ing-wen, the first female president of Taiwan.

Focusing on Mark Lee Ping-bin, one of the most talented and prolific cinematographers in Asia, the movie details the itinerant lifestyle of a deeply observant and philosophical artist and the tolls that his profession takes on his family life.

The life of the epoch-making master of martial arts cinema, King Hu.

Documenting Taiwan from an aerial perspective offering a glimpse of Taiwan's natural beauty as well as the effect of human activities and urbanization on our environment.

A warm and engaging documentary about young boys training for gymnastics competition.

Grace Fisher was an active musician and dancer until a rare spine disease almost derailed her budding career. In this award winning documentary, we see grief transformed into gratitude and tragedy turned into opportunity.

In the table that symbolizes the value of traditional women, a woman who wants to break free from her family must face her daughter.

Seven years. Eight married couples. They are open and honest, reflecting on why they married each other in the first place, why they have lost the passion, and why they are tired of the other person's problems with the mother-in-law; they talk about sex, having children, and the fact that they can't stand each other any longer...

'Wansei' refers to those Japanese who were born in Taiwan during the colonial period. After WWII, they were repatriated to Japan. It took the director 12 years to conduct the interviews and five years to shoot. It tells the stories of not only Wansei themselves but their friendships, family ties and bravery when facing the harsh adversity.

"Tudou", freshly 19, lives with his uncle and older brother in a Sanheyuan compound. He starts to fend for himself at an early age and takes on high-risk jobs of labor, even ones in legal grey areas. A group of young people from the countryside of Yunlin, Taiwan are eager to turn their lives around, but life is ever changing. When they join the workforce and start a family at an early age, will their children share the same fate?

The Ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou’s dream of becoming a butterfly blurs reality and fantasy, reflecting a poet’s desire for freedom and eternity. The coming of Tulku draws from Buddhist classics, using Chou Meng-tieh’s life as a metaphor. His experiences at WuChang Street and his bookstand, started in 1959, led to enlightenment and loyalty to Buddha and loved ones. Influenced by Buddhism, his poems blend Zen with grace, affection, and prudence, capturing life’s essence with strength and delicacy. He closed his bookstand in 1980 due to illness.

After four decades, a group of veteran singers gather together again. The songs they wrote when they were young had once changed the fate of the island. However, time took away their youth and changed the island's soul. Not only a new national identity has formed but so many new music genres have emerged since then. Can the innocent songs they sang back in the old days still be related to the new era?

In the waters around Kinmen Island, there is a curious creature which has existed for over 200 million years. People on Kinmen have made a living from the sea for over 300 years. They have survived the cross-strait conflicts between Taiwan and mainland China. But in the era of peace, both now face a critical crisis: the misuse of the coast by commercial development.

Richly illustrated with film clips and interviews, OUR TIME, OUR STORY tells the still-evolving story of the Taiwanese "new wave," from its rise in the early 1980s, as the island was democratizing after decades under martial law, through growing international recognition and domestic debate in the 1990s. Spearheaded in its early years by such filmmakers as Edward Yang, Ko I-cheng, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wan Jen, the movement revitalized Taiwan cinema through low-budget experiments that emphasized personal stories, political reflection and stylistic invention. Said filmmakers, writers and actors like Wu Nien-jen and Sylvia Chang, even "second wave" directors Tsai Ming-liang and Lin Cheng-sheng provide fond reminiscences and retrospective insights in this compelling account of one of the most distinctive national cinemas of the last quarter-century.

The director gets a phone call from his aged mother. A stubborn woman, she worries about the future of the rest of the family. The father is a gambling addict in poor health; the brother is penniless yet sure of his talent as a medium. Looking back at the reasons he left 20 years earlier, Elvis A-Liang Lu creates a wonderful family portrait, touching and full of light.

In 1996, Dr Wen's son, committed suicide in their home in Iowa City. Devastated, Dr Wen moved to Miami and years later would treat a young boy from Peru with cancer named Sebastian. Sebastian's optimism inspires Dr. Wen as we follow this inspiring story of youth and compassion.

Taiwan is an island country. Although it is surrounded by the sea, its people fear the sea since the politics, the history and the religious beliefs held on this island make people turn their backs to the sea. Oceanic literature author Liao Hung-chi and underwater photographer Ray Chin lead the audience out to the sea and into the water. They prompt us to understand the sea and to think about the possibility that the ocean might become our lives and the future of our country.

A star of the Taiwanese student movement, a celebrity Chinese student who loves Taiwan, and a Taiwanese documentary filmmaker passionate about politics. Each of them shared dreams of rebellion and building a better country. In the wake of the biggest social movement in Taiwan in recent years, they reflect on how close they came to realising their goals, how they were let down, and whether it is still possible to continue fighting for ideals.

In 2016, the parties of the Taiwan Legislative Yuan submitted drafts on the marriage equality act but were confronted with anti-LGBTQ groups. Meanwhile, three pairs of same-sex partners are also facing their own family issues. Tien-Ming and Hsiang have been in love for more than 30 years, but their love is being tested with old-age and illness. Jovi and Mindy spend most of their time protesting for marriage equality, fighting for the rights of Jovi's daughter. Gu flew from Macau to live with Shinchi but is now struggling with finances and the pressure to come out to their parents...

Between 1979 and 1983, 117 violent and gritty social realist pictures were produced in Taiwan. Many of these found their way around the world courtesy of Hong Kong's IFD films.

Composed of a series of portrait shots of mostly anonymous individuals, filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang's digital experiment turns the human face into a subject of dramatic intrigue.

Wang Wen-xin, a revered novelist, is known for his deep appreciation of words and slow, deliberate writing style. He co-founded the literary magazine Modern Literature with classmates from National Taiwan University. His notable work, “Family Catastrophe,” published in 1973, was praised for its innovative language and realistic portrayal of interpersonal relationships. Another significant work, “Backed against the Sea,” took 25 years to complete and is celebrated for its modernist beauty. Wang is currently working on a new book, though its release date is unconfirmed.

The Good Daughter is a portrait of the fraught marriage between a Taiwanese man and his Vietnamese bride. Born out of a disabled man's wish to obey his mother and a woman's effort to help her family escape poverty, the marriage has produced two daughters and a complicated drama. The film takes us inside a household simmering with tensions.

Taiwan's democracy is the envy of Chinese people all over the world. At the same time, when this two-party system-'blue' and 'green'-get at each other's throats, it seems to cast a dark cloud over this beacon of advancing democratization. How does the young generation, many of them first time voters, feel about the political environment they've inherited? Will they allow for their political differences to drive a deeper wedge into the Taiwanese society? A year and a half before Taiwan's 2012 Presidential Election I gathered a group of young people from across the blue and green spectrum to participate in a political dialogue. Although they're from opposing parties, they were willing to talk politics. Through these deliberately arranged dialogues, what sparks will fly?

Lush jungle and a building in ruins are the ideal stage for a film-confession that defies storytelling and goes beyond conversation on cinema. Tsai Ming-Liang and his actor Lee Kang-sheng confess and put on stage a pièce in which attention and slowness are in tune with the rhythm of memory. The unveiling of Tsai Ming-liang’s filmmaking: from Stray Dogs to the most intimate notes of the director-actor relationship.

Following Karen, a Malaysian teenage boy of Indian origin, this film documents his youth in a period of six years. Through Karen, we explore the hardship his people have endured and the eventual breakdown of his family both caused by the racial discrimination and education inequality in Malaysia.

Raye’s devastating documentary follows the plight of some 450 dogs brought through a single animal shelter during the winter of 2013. Policy dictates that any animal not adopted within 12 nights will be destroyed. Only around 10% of residents will be so lucky as to survive. As they wait, their time in the shelter is fraught with anguish, disease, and only the slimmest possibility of a better life. Executive produced by novelist and filmmaker Giddens Ko (You Are The Apple Of My Eye).

Kota, a city in North-West India famous for its coaching institutions, attracts more than 200,000 teenagers from all across the country to prepare for the undergraduate competitive exams. These students reside in cubicle sized hostel rooms and study for more than 15 hours a day for two consecutive years to crack the entrance exams for prestigious colleges that has acceptance rate of less than one percent. These students face intense insurmountable pressure from coaching institutes, peers and their families which not everyone is equipped to cope with, resulting in some students taking the extreme step of suicide.

"What the axe forgets, the trees remember." The Tree Remembers presents the current situation in Malaysia where the racial policy is still practiced and the victims are forced to remain silent. This film re-examines the origin of racism in Malaysia and the taboo of racial riot in 1969.

This documentary focuses on the love story between Dr. Tian and Mrs. Tian. And how fought for democratization of Taiwan.

Hanzi is a documentary exploring international design, visual culture, and identity through the lens of modern Chinese typography. The film covers a variety of topics such as how languages shape identity, and what role handwriting plays in the digital age.

This documentary turns the spotlight on an overlooked component of filmmaking: the art of foley through the perspective of Taiwan’s most experienced master, Hu Ding-yi. Hu has worked tirelessly for decades in his studio, manually recreating diegetic sounds (sounds whose source are visible on screen) using his large collection of everyday objects. Through the artisan’s eyes, Wang Wan-jo’s timely documentary looks back at the golden age of Taiwanese cinema and examines the new dynamics of the Greater China film industry. Hu received the Lifetime Achievement prize at the 2017 Golden Horse Awards.

Poetry, literature, painting and old film clips converge in this lyrical, unusually designed film essay about Le Moulin, the Taiwanese poets’ collective which protested in the 1930s against the cultural superiority of the Japanese occupier and the domination of realism in poetry.

To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the victory of WWII, this documentary film describes the eight years of dauntless air-force fighting of the republic of China during the Anti-Japanese War, with only 300 combat-capable aircraft from China while Japan had over 2000.

Polar Super Marathon: Chen Yanbo, running for the dream

Nguyen was reported for a car theft and ended up being shot nine times by police officer Chen Chung-wen. Nguyen bled to death on the way to the hospital. The public supported Chen's use of firearms against the runaway migrant who resisted arrest. Were the nine shots the only cause of Nguyen's death? When the perpetrator isn't necessarily the true perpetrator, is the imperfect victim the one to blame?

Between Mount Kavulungan and the Gaoping River, history streams across the wilderness, coalescing the values and identities of different peoples. So begins the Pakedavai family ritual. As an 11th-generation descendant of the Pakedavai ruler family, Dabiliyan Alifu grew up in a family slate house in the Sandimen tribe. For him, the family is a constant source of education about how to live with the forest and what kind of person to become. Of Pakedavai’s 12th generation, Kang Yuan-Jin grew up in a traditional Chinese community with a Paiwan grandmother and a Chinese grandfather. Only in adulthood did he start to explore the meanings of family and personal identity.

Liu Na’ou’s The Man with a Movie Camera is comprised of five episodes, shot in four cities across national boundaries: Tainan, Canton, Shenyang, and Tokyo. It displays impressionistic street spectacle and images of quotidian life, as well as excursions by train and ship, unfolding as a private visual journal and a sort of souvenir, but with refined framing, camera movement, and rhythmic editing. With his own perspective and artistic sensitivity embedded in this film, struggling between being a Japanese colonial subject and a Taiwanese/Chinese litterateur, Liu attempts to transcend geological, national, racial/ethnic, linguistic and medial boundaries, to establish a depoliticized, internationalist, cosmopolitan cinematic utopia, a pure cinema, and a fluid and contested identity.

As a storied apartment complex awaits its eventual demolition, its inhabitants teeter on the edge of poverty in an invisible city hidden in plain sight.

Hong Kong is facing tyranny, and a pair of brothers are marching on their own ways in the revolution. However, the horror is approaching, and it’s like this city knows everything, it reborns after it collapses. There seems to be a huge energy behind this, asking inwardly: What is the fight for?

Son and father are driving on the highway. The son keeps asking questions until he finally notices the changes in his father's body. The dialogue in the animation is taken from a recording of a real conversation between the filmmaker and his father.

In 2013, the Golden Horse Film Festival celebrated its 50th anniversary. The ministry of Culture commissioned director Yang Li-chou to make a documentary about the history of Golden Horse. What is unique to this film is that it's not an ode to celebrities but about the role cinema plays in ordinary people's lives. It's a love letter to cinema, filmmakers and audiences.

“Lio-ma-gou” is the only fresh water in Green Island, In the 1950s, in a political prison concentration camp, held nearly 100 female political prisoners. With the film, let us follow the pursuit and inquiries of the young generation, and approach the two “former female political prisoner.”

From every November to the following February, indigenous migrant fishermen set up camp along Taiwan's Lanyang River to catch the season's first batch of eel fries. Camaraderie and bonds are forged between them as they survive the hardship together.

30 years after the Taiwanese New Wave first emerged, the veterans such as Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang remain active in their careers. Ten of Edward Yang's former assistants have become directors. The filmmakers of the younger generation are facing a Taiwanese audience hungry for films that link them with Taiwanese society, whether they are fictional or not.

Caring for an autistic adult can be seen as an act of faith. It is unpredictable. A regular interaction can lead to a violent lashing-out. However, due to its lack of exposition and its pure form of observation, the film captures something even more profound: life as a collection of failure, pain, and tragedy as felt by its protagonist, Chen Hung-tung, a father who cares with extraordinary patience for his autistic son Li-fu.

The daughter looked through the viewfinder of the camera and gazed upon her father's appearance before he passed away. Then she realized this estranged and absurd father had been influencing her all along. The one she had once run away from was also the one she missed the most.

The camera zooms in to its ultimate to the sky and catches what we can’t see with our naked-eye: noise, space, moonlight, and waves.

Having grown up in the mountains Chiayi, installation artist WANG Wen-chih weaves his memories of mountains and forests into his work. Using natural materials such as bamboo, rattan and wood, WANG creates his art with hands and collective labor. The huge spaces he constructs emit such deep and strong power that surprise and move countless visitors. This film follows WANG on his journey of creation.

HUNG Chun-hsiu spent seven years filming three residents of Kinmen island: an owner of a local photography shop, a retired officer and a Chinese woman from Sichuan province who came to Kinmen with the hope for a better future. Using photographs and archival materials, HUNG explores the personal stories of three residents and how they reflect upon the upheavals between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait.

The walker with the shaved head and dressed in a red robe is barefoot. He walks slowly but determinedly through the forest, over stones and grassland. He also makes his way through the shadows of trees and houses. He sets foot in the train station, the church and the museum. The sun rises and sets again. The walker passes through Washington, D.C. Another stranger is also on the move in the city. We are unsure whether or not he is following the walker.

There is no dialogue or narration in this "fake" documentary, which has the look of a real documentary, but actually uses actors to portray awakening residents of Taipei as they go about their morning routines. With the camera as our guide we see lively early morning markets, residents going to church, students practicing singing, people exercising, and others heading off to work.

On the Train captures from the birth to the last moment of the railway, 98.2 kilometers long and opened in 1992, crossing southern Taiwan.