Formosa's Paradox II 2026 Film Super-8mm, colour and black and white, sound, 12 mins

Shot entirely on Super 8mm, the film unfolds in three movements that progress from the sensory to the political, tracing an intimate cartography of Taiwanese identity. The first explores the lush vegetation of Taiwan —its giant plants, its palm trees— alongside the discovery of Buddhist and Taoist spirituality. The second movement enters Taipei: its bright colors, the compositions of signs and plants, the chaos and the calm. Over these images, the voice of Tehching Hsieh is layered in an interview in which he declares his disinterest in cinema as an artistic medium. The third travels through the symbols of Taiwanese democracy and autonomy —the Legislative Yuan, Liberty Square, the National Human Rights Museum, 228 Memorial Park, TSMC headquarters— juxtaposing them with images of the KMT's authoritarian past: the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and the Cih-hu Memorial Statue Park. The film concludes in the summer of 2025, during the "Great Recall Wave" —an unprecedented civic campaign to remove dozens of KMT legislators accused of favoring Beijing's interests and undermining Taiwan's defense capabilities, but which ultimately failed. Since 1949, when the Kuomintang established its government on the island following the Japanese surrender, Taiwan has lived with a singular paradox: functioning as a sovereign democracy while inhabiting a diplomatic limbo; aspiring to a political utopia in which its self-determination might be fully recognized. This film asks: can utopia exist within perpetual ambiguity? Or is it precisely this position between two worlds that constitutes contemporary Taiwanese subjectivity?