Happy International Women’s Day! In honor of women, this week I’d like to tell everyone about Taiwan’s longest-running film festival promoting female talent. Films are an extremely powerful way of allowing someone else to see the world through your eyes, and the Women Make Waves Festival provides a platform to highlight these gendered perspectives.
Established in 1993, the Taiwan International Women Make Waves Film Festival (台灣國際女性影展) features work from female (including self-identifying female) directors in a variety of different genres. Using mediums including animation and stop-motion, the films shown at Women Make Waves are both hard-to-find international films and local films that tell unique stories. With feminism and queerness as the main focus, films touch on issues like sexual autonomy, same-sex marriage, and other topics that generate debate and controversy. “I’m not afraid of conflict;” says Women Make Waves Director Lo Pecha, “in fact I love it.”
Since 2001, the festival has also started touring around the island and screening films in more rural areas of Taiwan, making Women Make Waves the first touring festival in Taiwan. By touring throughout Taiwan, the festival exposes more people to their collection of international and local films and talking with the locals generates new discussions around the films. As Lo says, “I don’t go to lecture them, but to let them express their emotions. The post-screening exchanges are more interesting than the movies themselves.”
Some films screened at Women Make Waves have also been shown at other festivals as well. But, as Lo Pecha notes, showing the films at Women Make Waves allows the films to be seen in a new light. Little Hilly (山川壯麗), for instance, is a puppet-animation about a girl who faces bullying. When shown at other festivals, the focus is on the technical aspects of the animation, but at Women Make Waves the discussion focuses on the film’s female director Huang Yun and how the young female main character deals with her struggles.
Last year’s Golden Award winner of Women Make Waves was a student project called A Letter to Ama (給阿媽的一封信). Guided by director Chen Hui-Ling, the 105-minute long film gathers together memories of Taiwan’s past. Through interviews, the film looks back on Taiwan’s history of oppression under authoritarian rule and colonization. Other winners from last year also featured unique aspects of Taiwanese culture—Sisters’ Busy Hands (手事業), one of the Silver Award winners tells the story of a betel nut stand run by three women, and My Grandmother is an Egg (我的阿婆是一類蛋), who won a Special Mention by the Jury is about the traditional practice of selling young girls to be raised as a family’s future daughter-in-law.
With the festival normally taking place in October, Women Make Waves is still accepting submissions. (Although currently from only Taiwan, since the deadline for international submissions has already passed.) And to fill the long months until October comes again, there’re plenty of films in their film archive to look through and enjoy! Their website contains a wealth of films by female directors, so let’s celebrate International Women’s Day for more than a day, a week, or a month and dig in!
(Featured image by Women Make Waves via Taiwan News )
Taiwan Culture Corner 
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