Freedom Crossing Film Festival in Philadelphia Features Taiwanese Films

TaiwanPlus News

The Freedom Crossing Film Festival opening at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia features films and documentaries from Taiwan. TaiwanPlus speaks to the festival's curator Ming-hua Hsiao for insight into the event's significance.

Transcript

00:00Minghua, can you tell us about the origin of the festival? How did it all start?

00:04The Film Festival, Freedom Crossing Film Festival, was started during the pandemic.

00:10And during the pandemic, we all have a deep concern about this full crisis of the whole humanity.

00:20At that time, we were thinking about what we can do to help people to deliver their free spirit,

00:26to reach out outside of the world, where everybody was forced to stay inside.

00:33So at that time, we were thinking, the spirit of freedom, at that critical moment,

00:40is the most important thing. So I started to create and create the scenes of life and death.

00:48And luckily, I find there are a lot of good documentaries and films in Taiwan that

00:55happen to care about those issues, about people's life. So I bring them over to the Film Festival.

01:03Among all the films featured at the festival, there is Untold Her Story.

01:07What makes this film special?

01:10There are not too many stories about the white terror area in Taiwan,

01:13and this one is definitely a significant one. Especially the films address the female

01:19experience for the prisoners in Green Island during the 1950s to 1970s.

01:26And this period of time is a very special time when Taiwan was under authoritarian

01:32government, and there were a lot of people who lose their freedom if they try to express

01:39their rights, their opinions, or if they were acting something disobeying the government's order.

01:47So Taiwan had experienced such a dark time, and then we overcome this history and transform

01:54our country to a liberal democracy. And right now, we are confident enough to look back to the

02:03history at that time, and to reflect that history through the individual and the personal experience,

02:09and to see those women as a person, not as criminals or prisoners.

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