Series Site
March 10–14
The title of this program, “Indigenous with a Capital ‘I’”, is indebted to the late Maori director Barry Barclay, who first introduced the concept of “Fourth Cinema” in the 1980s to promote two iconic ideas: that indigenous stories in films should be interpreted by indigenous people, and that the indigenous “interiority” should be recognized and highlighted as a creative force. Owing to fast-developing technologies and wider availability of affordable equipment, the 1990s saw an explosion in Taiwanese documentary filmmaking, when indigenous filmmakers picked up their cameras to tell authentic stories of their own communities.
This series – curated by the Taiwan International Documentary Festival, where it was first presented in 2021 – selects 16 films produced between 1994 and 2000 by indigenous filmmakers who studied in film academies, worked as journalists, or attended local training camps on cultural/historical documentary filmmaking. The series explores these early productions in terms of their central issues, viewpoints, aesthetics, and formation of discourses. Productions from this era may be regarded as the first wave of indigenous cinema in Taiwan; they preserve invaluable historical records that inform our understanding of Taiwanese society today.