The Taiwan International Documentary Festival has unveiled the full programme for its 15th edition, setting out an expansive 10-day programme that combines competition titles, curated thematic sections, retrospective work and public events across Taipei and New Taipei City. Running from 1 to 10 May 2026, the festival will present more than 180 screenings and related programmes.
This year’s edition is built around three main competition strands, the Asian Vision Competition, International Competition and Taiwan Competition, each of which will present 15 selected works after a record number of submissions. Additional prizes will also be awarded through the Cross-section Competition.
Departing from earlier editions that began with a film screening, TIDF will open on 1 May with Death Is Certain but Not Final Vol. IV, a lecture performance by London-based Palestinian-Egyptian filmmaker Saeed Taji FAROUKY. The same impulse runs through the focus programme Palestine and Its Archiveless Archive, which gathers works by Palestinian filmmakers using re-filming, erasure, re-editing and embodied intervention to confront the violence of disappearance and reclaim visual memory.
TIDF also makes a major investment in documentary form itself. Sensible but Unsayable — A Retrospective of the Sensory Ethnography Lab, described as the first retrospective in Asia of the Harvard-based collective, brings together feature films and shorts associated with a mode of filmmaking rooted in sensory immersion and formal experimentation. Elsewhere, Stranger Than Documentary highlights hybrid and cross-disciplinary approaches to nonfiction, while also paying tribute to Japanese filmmaker NISHIKAWA Tomonari through eight short works on 16mm. The section Contemporary Landscapes similarly points toward a transnational and aesthetically ambitious conception of documentary, including works such as Direct Action and My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow, alongside films by Anocha SUWICHAKORNPONG, Travis WILKERSON and ODA Kaori.
The festival’s local framing is equally pronounced. Under Taiwan Spectrum | War Memories, Shifting Identities, TIDF traces the lives of Taiwanese soldiers across changing political regimes, from Japanese colonial rule to Nationalist conscription, while Taiwan Reel | The Late 1980s on Film revisits a decisive media transition from celluloid to videotape through the world premieres of four digital restorations of 16mm works by LEE Daw-ming. Other highlights include Encounters | The Living Landscape of Contemporary Canadian Documentary, presented with Montreal’s RIDM; the world premiere of the PTS production Water in the Balance by KE Chin-yuan; a tribute to Peter WATKINS; and selections from long-term partners Videotage and Forum Lenteng.
