Director
No matter where you are, not just in Taiwan, international movie fans can easily watch too! The first wave of films from emerging creators are now live in our international section. Featuring top selections from prestigious film festivals like Golden Horse Awards and Golden Harvest Awards, as well as many highly anticipated emerging works for you to explore anytime, anywhere!
Vancouver TAIWANfest describes itself as “a festival that wildly encourages dialogue.” But when it comes to gender, there are often many reasons not to talk about it. To save face, to protect the bigger picture, to keep family harmony, or simply to avoid discomfort. When words feel difficult, could film offer another way into the conversation? Through moving images, documentaries, and the intimate realities of individual lives, these works bring us closer to one another. Before rushing to say yes or no, we invite you to first sit with the complexity, diversity, and beauty of being human. Special thanks to our film selectors: Nathalie CHANG(CHANG Yi-Hsum) (Novelist), Rachel (Guitarist, P!SCO), Ted LIAO (Chef, Monsoon), Charlie SMITH (Editor, Pancouver), and Luna (TAIWANfest team).
Every day, we're redefining time: measuring the distance of a walk or commute in time, that socially awkward moment on a Monday or Friday, climate anomalies causing red maples to arrive early and fade late, the tense of making a takeaway coffee, the excessively long summer days in Europe, the timezone of late-night runs along riverbanks or tracks, the time difference making long-distance relationships between New Zealand and France so difficult. Time in its myriad forms, time in the plural, a museum of time. I love contemplating how artists think about time: spinning, leaping, with eyes closed; sometimes between waking and sleeping, but more often, collecting time itself.
This year’s Queer Film Festival poses a timely question to society: Boundless, limitless, borderless—can gender, and the existence or absence of it, become a plural possibility? Under the theme of “Endless Love” and “Infinite Love,” the festival explores diverse expressions of love and sexuality through cinema. Whether grounded in reality or born in the virtual, gender will be redefined and renegotiated. Through the performance and context of gender, the body becomes a vessel of both flesh and spirit. Humanity expresses its desires, orientations, and identities—blending, shifting, and converging into the infinite (∞): the limitless, the boundless, the ever-expanding potential of plurality. These shifting terrains of the body, desire, gender, and the fluid interplay of yin and yang give rise to a multitude of gendered possibilities. In this reimagined world, love, sexuality, and human connection are no longer subjects of discrimination, distortion, or stigma. Instead, we envision a new and beautiful future of infinite love—one that celebrates what it means to be fully, freely human.
The Women Make Waves International Film Festival in Taiwan is Asia’s first issue-based film festival focusing on women. Since its founding 29 years ago, it has been dedicated not only to promoting women's work in cinema but also to introducing Taiwanese audiences to films rich in gender discourse and humanistic vision. Giloo presents a curated selection of award-winning and officially selected films from the festival — both fiction and documentary — inviting you to revisit and celebrate these powerful works.
In 2021, two years after the legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan, nearly 6,000 same-sex couples have tied the knot. That same year, Japan saw a historic breakthrough when the Sapporo District Court ruled that banning same-sex marriage was unconstitutional—the first such ruling in the country’s history. Today’s East Asia may appear to be making epoch-defining progress, but every step forward has been paved by those who came before—people who have lived boldly and brilliantly through eras of repression, exclusion, and shame. It is through their relentless struggle that society has opened up, however slightly. From The Wedding Banquet (1993) to Until Rainbow Dawn (2019), what has Taiwan and Japan gone through over the past 26 years in terms of gender and societal shifts? And as children of these histories, how much of ourselves do we see reflected on screen?
