Hsu Ya-ting

The River

Director Hsu Ya-ting, along with her husband Geoffrey Hughes, explores childbirth and the physical and emotional toll that childbirth took on her personally. She uses her body as a canvas, providing viewers with a most intimate view of what the female body is subjected to when bringing a pregnancy to term.

Island of the Winds

On the outskirts of Taipei, there is a leprosy sanatorium built by the Japanese occupiers in 1930 to seclude thousands of patients and maintain sanitary conditions on the land. For the last two decades, Taiwanese authorities have decided to turn the sanatorium into a museum to commemorate the history of leprosy medicine. However, the sanatorium has slowly been destroyed due to constant construction that has overwhelmed the remaining aged patients. To cope with this struggle, they protest and build landscape models with their gnarled hands representing their accurate memories and experiences. They continue to fight against the authorities’ efforts to erase the history of segregation and discrimination and have not given up.