Taiwan
Set in ancient China, Zeng Jing is a skilled assassin who finds herself in possession of a mystical Buddhist monk’s remains. She begins a quest to return the remains to its rightful resting place, and thus places herself in mortal danger because a team of assassins is in a deadly pursuit to possess the remains which holds an ancient power-wielding secret.
A normal summer morning in “Outstanding Pool House,” Shine is getting ready for school. Shine is a beautiful and chic girl, but there is a bit of melancholy in her face. Six months ago, her parents died in a terrible car accident and left her nothing beside this pool house. Now, Shine even needs to face the fact that she will be sent to a foster home if there is no one from the family that can come and take care of her. Feng, Shine’s uncle, an ex-expert in billiards knows this and decides to come home and takes care of his niece. However, Shine does not appreciate this since, first of all, she is not familiar with his uncle at all. Secondly, after losing everything for gambling, Feng drinks and smokes all day, and those are what Shine hates the most. All in all, how can these two people find the way to reconnect with each other through billiards? Moreover, how can they see the love that runs in their veins for making them the family?
When social worker Shu-fen discovers that her pregnant teenage daughter Ya-ting has disappeared, her search for Ya-ting ends her with many horrifying mysteries… Meeting the mysterious Mei-hua who imprisons her own daughter inside her house covered with papers written with spells and encountering the missing and pregnant Yi-chun in an abandoned hospital, the trio returns to the Red Forest to rescue Ya-ting and Shu-fen finally realizes that the deepest fear arises from love…
The story about an ambitious journalist who eagerly pursues a long-forgotten accident. When the sole survivor of the accident suddenly disappears, he realizes that nothing is what it seems, and the unimaginable dark truth will haunt him for the rest of his life.
Pickle is a night security guard at a bronze statue factory. His colleague, Belly Bottom, works as a recycling collector during the day, and Pickle’s biggest pleasure in life is flicking through the porn magazines Belly Bottom collects in the small hours in the security room. Having late night snacks and watching television are an integral part of their dull lives. One day when the television is broken, their lives are changed forever. The story involves gods, the middle-aged men’s sexual desire and the conversation between ghosts and humans. Maybe the audience will find it preposterous, but isn’t life itself a farce?
Ren has finally succeeded his boss as the head of the North Fort Gang. For so long, his ambitions had been held back; now, he can realize them. But the ruthless Jian returns with his own gang. Though Ren and Jian were once like brothers, Ren’s position is challenged, causing tensions with Qing, his loyal captain. Now that former friends are enemies, what is the price of loyalty? What will be left of friendship when the smoke of battle clears?
A lurid fantasy of wounded flesh and accursed lives that entwine and separate in a building run by a landlord (Simon Yam), who seeks to find a particular type of tenant for the property he inherits from his relatives. Driven by his desire of peeping into the darkest aspects of human nature, what he sees through the eyes of the omnipresent cameras ain’t pretty… but it gives him the wry, abject satisfaction of a dark god lording over and leering at the souls of the damned, his imagination hungering toward them.
A cop travels back in time to take on a corporation that’s out to eliminate a doctor who has created a new technology which can break up the monopoly on a energy resources.
IN PURSUIT OF SILENCE is a meditative exploration of silence and the impact of noise on our
lives. The film takes us on an immersive cinematic journey around the globe—from a traditional
tea ceremony in Kyoto, to the streets of Mumbai, the loudest city on the planet—and inspires us
to both experience silence and celebrate the wonders of our world.
A Buddhist monk walks barefoot and incredibly slowly through Marseille – so slowly, that his progress is barely perceptible and he becomes a calming influence in the midst of the town’s goings-on.
General Yu is executed after having been accused of treason by the powerful eunuchs, and his children will be deported. Eunuchs plotting to kill even the children, and prepare an ambush on Dragon’s shelter in the middle of the desert. There are other guests, who are also interested in the deal.
10+10 is a project initiated by the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival to demonstrate the solidarity between Taiwanese film-makers. 20 directors are invited to make a 5-minute short film each on the theme of the “Uniqueness of Taiwan,” but allowed total freedom in all other aspects.
An incident brings a mid-aged Taiwanese woman and a young Filipino guy together. Although they can barely communicate with each other in language, she takes care of him out of instinct before her self-consciousness gets in the way to define what that ambiguous instinct is.
A mother intends to relocate Grandpa’s grave from the countryside to the city, where he could be re-buried with Grandma. However, her decision sparkles a conflict with Nana, Grandpa’s first wife. Nana is childless, and all she has is her husband’s grave. As a result, she fights flat out to stop Mother moving the grave. At first, Weiwei, caught between her mother and Nana, is turning the fight over the grave into a story on television, but after having spent time with Nana, she learns a new understanding of life. In the end, these three women of different generations, each facing her own problems in her love life, follow their hearts and make their decisions, which result in an unexpected ending to the incident.
Even in modern-day Taipei, women feel the societal pressure to get married and have children before the clock runs out. Thankfully, there is a solution: freeze your eggs and prolong your fertility until the right one comes along! Starring Ariel Lin, the film is a glimpse of what millions of working women struggle with: finding the balance between pursuing a career and marriage.
They live in an old house on the fringe of Taipei City: Rat and his elder gay brother Shanghe. Two brothers look for jobs to survive while search for themselves and long for a foothold in life. The younger works at market where he meets a mute woman who gets up to all sorts of craziness. The elder is attracted to a nightclub dancer and finds himself drawn into shifty business.
On the same day, in the same accident, Wei loses his pregnant wife and Ming her fiancé. In Buddhism, one is given 100 days to mourn for the dead. Like two mice lost in a labyrinth, Wei runs around in circles while Ming calmly creeps down a determined path. But the pain and sorrow linger on. With the 100th day approaching, they wonder if they’ll ever be able to say goodbye.
After her car breaks down on a rainy night, Miss Liang enters a nearby coffee shop called Cafe 6. The owner of the shop finds out that Miss Liang has just gotten into a fight with her boyfriend who is currently overseas, so to kill time, he shares a story of his time back in 1996. During that year, Guan Min-lu and his good friend Xiao Bo-zhi always hang out together. Min-lu is secretly in love with Li Xin-rui while Bo-zhi is attracted to Xin-rui’s best friend, Cai Xin-yi. The four young teenagers share a good relationship with each other and spend their days happily every day. But as their graduation day draws near, they wonder if they can still stay committed with each other after going their separate ways.
Chi earned her American dream after persevering with her studies in Taiwan. Following her grandmothers’ death, Chi returns to her family on Happiness Road, where she begins to feel nostalgic about her childhood and starts to contemplate the meaning of “life” and “home”. What is happiness? Will Chi find her own happiness?
Ah-Zhou, who is about to be honorably discharged from the military service, has a surreal dream. In the dream he sees the dead body of Shing-Shing Chen, a classmate in elementary school from years back. Is this dream implying that Shing-Shing Chen might have died? Soon afterwards, Ah-Zhou gets an unexpected five-day vacation and decides to look for Shing-Shing Chen. Nevertheless, he quickly learns that the special vacation is for him and another soon-to-be-discharged solider, Xiao-Gui, to go after a deserter, Kuen-He, who ran away with weapons two days ago. Both of them are worried about this assignment because they, the old birds, used to pick on Kuen-He, a spring chicken. And Kuen-He is now a deserter, armed and dangerous.
A Taiwanese high school baseball team travels to Japan in 1931 to compete in a national tournament.
College freshman Si-ying gets a part-time job at “Cafe. Waiting. Love” coffee shop, where she befriends Abusi, a tomboyish barista who can make any coffee the customers request, the beautiful and mysterious cafe owner, and Zeyu, the boy who always sits in the same spot in the cafe who seems to be very popular with girls and on whom Si-ying develops an instant crush.
Mabel, Liam and Aaron have been friends since childhood. Their bonds of friendship are tested when, years later, they realize their friendship is the only reason they have made it through emotional hardships and extreme tragedies.
While going back to Kinmen island during summer, Ah Kwan (Bryant Chang) learns from the internet about a pretty girl called Chen Wen Qing (Shara Lin), who emerged champion in the National Piano Competition. One day he coincidentally meets up with her. For both this is the best summer holiday they ever had in their lives. Before going back Wen Qing promises to Ah Kwan she would email him everyday and coming next summer, she would find him in Kinmen again.
Ah Jie lost everything in the stock market due to a severe economic crisis. He spends his days in his sealed apartment, smoking joints and looking after the marijuana plants that he secretly grows in his wardrobe. In desperation, he calls a suicide helpline and gets to know Chyi, whose sweet and gentle voice causes him to fall in love with his fantasized image of her. He tries to ask her out but is repeatedly rejected. He begins projecting his fantasy of Chyi on Shin, the new girl working at the betel nut stall downstairs. Shin is always sexily dressed in order to lure male customers. Ah Jie becomes closer to her and soon the two of them sink into a world of erotic and psychedelic pleasures. At the same time, Ah Jie begins to stalk Chyi.
Following the success of The Long Goodbye, the Taiwan Catholic Foundation of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia has embarked on a second documentary film dealing with the plight of elderly people suffering from conditions like Alzheimer’s and other degenerative disorders resulting in memory loss. When Yesterday Comes takes the route of a compendium of four shorts by different directors.
To chase promotion or to chase marriage? Young career-woman Lala returns after five years as a recently engaged young woman, but faces challenges when third parties tries to break up her relationship.
There are three stories of women and men: in “A Time for Love” set in 1966, a soldier searches for a young woman he met one afternoon playing pool; “A Time for Freedom,” set in a bordello in 1911, revolves around a singer’s longing to escape her surroundings; in “A Time for Youth” set in 2005 Taipei, a triangle in which a singer has an affair with a photographer while her partner suffers is dramatized. In the first two stories, letters are crucial to the outcome; in the third, it’s cell-phone calls, text messages, and a computer file. Over the years between the tales, as sexual intimacy becomes more likely and words more free, communication recedes.
An is-she-or-isn’t-she gay comedy focused on a Taiwanese teen, the boy she might like, and the girl she may love.
The movie continues the story from the TV series which ended with a cliff hanger where the wife (Sonia Sui) was deciding whether to return to her cheating husband (James Wen) or have a relationship with her boss (Chris Wang). 4 years after the divorce, her cheating husband, Wen Rui Fan, comes back in hopes of re-kindling their love. Will An Zhen return back to him or move on to a new love?
When a young street vendor with a grim home life meets a woman on her way to Paris, they forge an instant connection. He changes all the clocks in Taipei to French time.
A young farmer and his father are barely able to survive on their meagre corn harvest and so they make their way down from the mountains to the village to borrow money from their relatives working in jade mines or on opium plantations. But missing paperwork, deceit and corruption have left them impoverished too. Finally, the father pawns his cow for a moped so that his son can earn a living as a taxi driver. His first customer is Sanmei, who has returned to Myanmar to bury her grandfather. She decides not to go back to China and to get out of an arranged marriage in order to begin a new life with her son in her old country. When Sanmei accepts a job as a drug runner she persuades the young farmer to be her driver.
A Japanese girl (Kato Youki) is on a three month visit in Taiwan after breaking up with her boyfriend to study Chinese at a language center. One day she has a brief affair with Wu and later he requests her to sign a contract to be his girlfriend for 90 days and she agrees. One of the condition of the contract is they must get separated after 90 days. However, after getting know each other quite well, both find that the relationship seems to be true love and both are unwilling to break the contract agreement as the dateline approaches. What is the outcome of their love story in the end?
Kai (Jack Yao), who works at his parent’s noodle shop by day and spends his nights in a bookstore to learn French, decides to go to Paris after his girlfriend, who recently left for Paris, dumps him by phone. Then the local neighborhood mafia boss offers Kai a free plane ticket to Paris if he takes a mysterious package with him.
Introverted Weichung has been married to Feng for nine years. They have one son together, and Feng would like to have another child with him. One day Stephen, an old friend who now organises weddings, appears and encourages Weichung to return to the gay life he had previously. Anxious not to lose his wife, Weichung tentatively begins seeing a flight attendant behind Feng’s back.
