The Vancouver Taiwanese Film Festival will celebrate its 20th anniversary with an exploration of how Taiwan’s emerging generation of image-makers express personal identity, cultural consciousness, and social perspectives.
“Amid the tides of globalization and digital transformation, young creators have grown up immersed in social media, multicultural environments, and cross-disciplinary artistic landscapes,” the festival website states. “Their lenses are not merely tools for capturing images, but symbols of observation, reflection, and expression.”
The Vancouver Taiwanese Film Festival begins on Friday (September 4) evening with a reception at the VIFF Centre, followed by the opening short film, “Year After Year”. That will be followed by the screening of the winner of the festival’s Short Film Contest Award.
Day 2 on Saturday (September 5) is when all five features will be screened at the VIFF Centre. One of the highlights is the 2024 neo-noir thriller Locust, which will be shown at 10 a.m. It stars Liu Wei-chen as a mute restaurant worker who helps a local street gang collect debts in his off hours.
Directed by Taiwanese American filmmaker KEFF, it’s set in Taipei in 2019 as Taiwan is preparing for a presidential election and protests in Hong Kong are gaining worldwide attention. In 2024, KEFF was nominated for the Golden Camera award and Critics’ Week Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
Watch the trailer (above) for Girl.
Festival presents Shu Qi’s directorial debut
Also at 10 a.m., the festival will screen Shu Qi’s Girl. Starring Bai Xiao-Ying in the title role, this 2025 drama is about a chronically sad child who tries to present herself normally at school even though her life at home is a horror story. Her father (Roy Chiu) regularly beats her mother, played masterfully by hip-hop star 9m88, forcing difficult choices on the child. It marked the directorial debut of Shu Qi, who is one of Taiwan’s most famous actors.
At 12:20, two more films are scheduled. Frank Cheng and Sheng-Jung Tang co-directed The Photo from 1977. It’s a historical romance centred around a taekwondo coach (Jung Jinyoung) who’s forced out of his position and a local student activist (Moon Lee) who are brought together by a photograph. In this 2025 film, cast members speak four languages—Mandarin, Hakka, Korean, and English.
Watch the trailer (above) for The Photo from 1977.
Final film full of family drama
The second film at 12:20 p.m., Though Dead, Still Alive, is an award-winning comedic 2025 TV movie directed by Charles Yang and stars Joseph Hsia, Candy Yang, and Fang Wen-lin. It’s about a married couple whose son has been in a vegetative state for three years due to an accident. The couple are receiving benefits from the government. Yet as they are about to be assessed for a new subsidy, the son dies.
This creates a conundrum. In order to keep receiving payments, they must create the illusion that their son is still alive.
The festival’s final feature, The Waves Will Carry Us, will be screened at 2 p.m. It’s about a man who returns to Malaysia after his father dies, resulting in an unexpected adventure along with family drama, cultural misunderstandings, and bizarre twists of fate. Filmmaker Kek Huatt Lau was nominated for the 2025 Golden Horse Awards for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Vera Chen won the Golden Horse Award and the Taipei Film Award for Best Supporting Actress.
In addition, the festival will screen more than a dozen short films at the VIFF Centre on Saturday, starting at 9:30 a.m.
Watch the trailer (above) for The Waves Will Carry Us.
For more information on the Vancouver Taiwanese Film Festival, visit the website.
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