family is really important in Taiwan

One of the less annoying jobs I’ve been doing over the last couple of weeks has been editing stuff for December’s Taipei International Documentary Film Festival, which will show a bunch of movies from all over the world (with a disproportionate number from Israel, for some reason), as well as a good number made in Taiwan. They need everything in Chinese and English, so I’ve been going through their movie blurbs, correcting the English and making sure the English and Chinese descriptions correspond (which means I am sometimes end up correcting their Chinese, which is hubris—even I can tell that my Chinese interpolations are not beautiful, and sometimes verge on the full-on weird in my attempt to get across the English meaning. But I’m sure they will re-edit for me). I got into this through a couple of friends who are helping set the thing up—Alex, mentioned a few posts back, who is working on the organizational side of things, and Tony, who was one of the people deciding which films should be shown (they got over 500 submissions, and Tony ended up watching about a third of them).

Tony’s a filmmaker in his own right. Even though he calls his films “experimental,” I think some of them are actually pretty great—and I’m convinced it’s not just because I think he’s lovely and funny and adorable, and also not just because I was in a very benign altered state when I first saw some of them. During the period that he was locked in his apartment watching movies nonstop for weeks on end, Tony occasionally emerged to rave about some of the black and white stuff coming out of Russia, and complain that if Taiwanese filmmakers are not filming aboriginals, all they can think of is to make movies about their parents. Looking at these blurbs, it turns out he’s right: almost all the Taiwanese entries are about the director’s parents; if not, then they’re about his grandparents; and if not that, then they are about himself, as a child, and his relationship to his parents. In response to my queries about what connects Taiwanese and mainland Chinese culture, people here have often told me that "Chinese people all think that family is really important.” I guess they’re not kidding.