These are the winners of the 13th Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival which took place from May 6 – 15, 2022.

Asian Vision Competition

Grand Prize

In the town where the filmmaker was born, he and his family are following an age-old tradition by building a tomb for his grandparents. This carefully composed portrait of a village, interspersed with scenes of people at work, personal memories, and philosophical reflections, gradually unveils the spiritual world of the hometown and offers a meditation on existence itself. (TIDF 2022)

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Merit Prize

L, a university student in India, writes letters to her estranged lover, while he is away. Through these letters, we get a glimpse into the drastic changes taking place around her. Merging reality with dreams, memories, fantasies and anxieties, an amorphous narrative unfolds. (TIDF 2022)

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Special Jury Prize

One risked rushing against raging waves to escape being involved in the Cultural Revolution; one resisted colonialism and was imprisoned due to participating in printing patriotic periodicals; one supported the students’ demands for freedom, only to see their dreams and bodies crushed by tank treads. The past is presented in fictional scenes, with today’s activists playing those of yesteryear, as their scarred memories and experiences become more tangled than ever. (TIDF 2022)

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Jury Special Mention

Since 2009, the filmmaker has spent 12 years documenting the ever-changing times of three townships along the coast of Tainan County, namely Beimen, Jiangjun and Qigu. Through the lenses, human activities are seen closely connected with the surrounding nature, while maintaining its own charm. The film subtly captures a singular way of life and a sense of time suspended in the past, present and future. (TIDF 2022)

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International Competition

Grand Prize

Two family histories, one century and two metropolises merge in one person: Weina ZHAO, whose parents called her ‘Vienna’ – Wéiyěnà – because they emigrated to Austria. Her journey into the history of China leads to the Japanese Occupation and the Cultural Revolution, while tackling the great issues of the 21st century: migration, identity and the search for one’s past. (TIDF 2022)

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Merit Prize

‘Danse Macabre’ is a dance that explores deaths that are remembered and forgotten in history, including those of kings, citizens, and stateless people, on land that many kings chose as their vacation residence. People’s deaths are as different as the social class they belong to, in a country where social inequality strongly persists.IIn Thailand, many deaths were suspicious in nature over the past 90 years, but nobody dared to question them. (TIDF 2022)

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Jury Special Mention

Rain in 2020 took LEE Yong-chao seven years to make. It shows how a family copes with the changing situation and what is happening in Myanmar. Amid the pandemic in 2020, a torrential rain caused the family and the entire village to soak in the flooding sewage. Nobody knows when the muddy water will be gone and what will come after the storm. (TIDF 2022)

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Taiwan Competition

Grand Prize

Kaohsiung served as an important military base under Japanese colonial rule and had incurred heavy casualties during the 228 Incident. The film subtly tends to the deep scars of the witnesses, survivors and their descendants as an act of resistance to oblivion. Memories survive through different eras of oppression and continue to live in people’s hearts, just like the wild tomatoes grown in this land. (TIDF 2022)

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Merit Prize

During the martial law period, a Taiwanese American writer Henry LIU was shot dead by assassin WU Dun. This case was later confirmed to be a political murder jointly committed by the Military Intelligence Bureau and United Bamboo Gang in Taiwan. After being released from prison, WU became a film producer and established a film company that produced ‘wuxia films’. In this film, the filmmaker revisited WU’s abandoned studio to restage the events with forensic scanning techniques. (TIDF 2022)

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Jury Special Mention

K’s room’ is a mental space that serves as a metaphor for the complex relationship between men, boundaries, and the nation state during Taiwan’s martial law period. All the lines in the film were extracted from New English Grammar, one of Taiwan’s most popular English grammar books published in 1960, as a way of reconstructing the mental state of its author Mr. K who was sent to prison due to political reasons. (TIDF 2022)

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TIDF Visionary Award

Grand Prize

Special Jury Prize

More than twenty years ago, Dazhang along with his three brothers came to Guangdong to work in a local quartz powder factory. However, a few years later, Dazhang was diagnosed with advanced staged pneumoconiosis. Returning to his hometown, the pneumoconiosis was gradually killing him every single day. The entire family was stuck in this seemingly endless suffering, while his children were still confused about what happened to their father. (TIDF 2022)

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Jury Special Mention

Taiwan Film Critics Society Prize

Next Generation Award

Di is a 12-year-old girl living in a village in the mist of Northwest Vietnamese mountains. She belongs to the Hmong ethnic minority where women get married very young, enduring the controversial tradition of ‘bride-kidnapping’. When Di enters puberty, the carefree little girl has turned into an impetuous, hypersensitive teenager. On the Lunar New Year’s Eve, when Di’s parents come back home after celebrating, the house is silent and empty: Di has disappeared. (TIDF 2022)

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Audience Award