The Taiwan International Documentary Festival has unveiled two major curated sections for its 2026 edition: Taiwan Spectrum and Reel Taiwan, which will revisit postwar history, wartime memory, and the political transformations that reshaped the island in the late twentieth century. Organised by the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute, the festival runs from 1 to 10 May and will use restored films, archival materials and contemporary nonfiction works to trace how documentary cinema continues to mediate Taiwan’s shifting cultural and historical identity.
This year’s Taiwan Spectrum, titled «War Memories, Shifting Identities», brings together 12 films spanning nearly a century. The programme examines the experiences of Taiwanese soldiers first mobilised under Japanese imperial rule and later shaped by the postwar Nationalist regime, exploring how successive systems of power left marks on individual lives and collective consciousness. The selection moves from colonial-era propaganda and wartime mobilisation films to 1990s interview-based works and more recent documentaries, creating a dialogue between official images and later attempts to reclaim or reframe suppressed histories.
Among the highlights are the world premiere of Archive: Li Guang-hui (1975–1979), assembled from preserved footage and rough-cut master tapes linked to the late filmmaker CHANG Chao-tang, and the first theatrical screening in Taiwan of FUJII Hikaru’s Mujō (The Heartless) in a new cinematic version adapted from its original multi-channel installation. The programme also includes Nihon Documentary Union’s Asia Is One and LAU Kek-huat’s From Island to Island, the latter serving as an important point of departure for the section’s curatorial approach to contested wartime memory and the unresolved tensions between victimhood, complicity and national narrative.
Running alongside it, Reel Taiwan turns to a more recent but equally volatile moment in the island’s history. Titled «The Late 1980s on Film», the section centers on four restored 16mm works by LEE Daw-ming, recipient of the 2022 TIDF Outstanding Contribution Award. The titles address subjects ranging from refugees on the Thai-Cambodian border to Indigenous ritual and Taiwan’s growing environmental movement, offering a portrait of a society on the verge of major democratic and social transformation. All four restorations will receive their world premieres at the festival, with LEE attending post-screening discussions.
The films also underline the material history of documentary practice in Taiwan. At a time when many filmmakers shifted to video in the late 1980s, LEE continued to work on film, valuing its archival durability. The restored titles include Beyond the Killing Fields: Refugees on the Thai-Cambodian Border, which won the Golden Horse Award for Best Documentary, Songs of Pasta’ay, described as Taiwan’s first ethnographic documentary fully shot with sync sound, and two films documenting environmental activism in the years surrounding the lifting of martial law.
For more information, please visit TIDF official website
