The Freedom Crossing Film Festival opening at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia features films and documentaries from Taiwan. TaiwanPlus speaks to the festival's curator Ming-hua Hsiao for insight into the event's significance.
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00:00Minghua, can you tell us about the origin of the festival? How did it all start?
00:04The Film Festival, Freedom Crossing Film Festival, was started during the pandemic.
00:10And during the pandemic, we all have a deep concern about this full crisis of the whole humanity.
00:20At that time, we were thinking about what we can do to help people to deliver their free spirit,
00:26to reach out outside of the world, where everybody was forced to stay inside.
00:33So at that time, we were thinking, the spirit of freedom, at that critical moment,
00:40is the most important thing. So I started to create and create the scenes of life and death.
00:48And luckily, I find there are a lot of good documentaries and films in Taiwan that
00:55happen to care about those issues, about people's life. So I bring them over to the Film Festival.
01:03Among all the films featured at the festival, there is Untold Her Story.
01:07What makes this film special?
01:10There are not too many stories about the white terror area in Taiwan,
01:13and this one is definitely a significant one. Especially the films address the female
01:19experience for the prisoners in Green Island during the 1950s to 1970s.
01:26And this period of time is a very special time when Taiwan was under authoritarian
01:32government, and there were a lot of people who lose their freedom if they try to express
01:39their rights, their opinions, or if they were acting something disobeying the government's order.
01:47So Taiwan had experienced such a dark time, and then we overcome this history and transform
01:54our country to a liberal democracy. And right now, we are confident enough to look back to the
02:03history at that time, and to reflect that history through the individual and the personal experience,
02:09and to see those women as a person, not as criminals or prisoners.