We present the list of winners of the Taiwan International Documentary Festival.

International Competition
Grand Prize

Brothers by Aslaug Holm – Norway | 2015 – 110 min.

Markus (14) and Lukas (11) live in an old, yellow townhouse in Oslo. Here the brothers grow up with their dreams and longings for the future. Markus loves football and wants to be a professional. Lukas is the philosophical one and likes to think all kinds of thoughts. This close and personal documentary about childhood and brotherhood is filmed by their mother in a period of five years.

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Merit Prize

Drought by Maria Ramos – Brazil | 2015 – 87 min.

Drought takes us through the arid landscape of the Brazilian Sertão. The camera accompanies a water truck through several villages while it supplies the local population with water. The result is a documentary road movie full of powerful images, revealing aspects of the ‘drought industry’ and an extremely pressing issue: water scarcity.

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Asian Vision Competition
Grand Prize

Hero and the Cloak by Arash Lahooti – Iran | 2015 – 62 min.

A middle-aged man, whose ancestor was the first hero of an ancient Iranian town two hundred years ago, had a dream of his ancestor asking him to find the cloak he lost to his opponent in his last wrestling match and to restore the family’s honour. A street performer of heroic acts, the man has been looking for the trace of his ancestor’s cloak in near and far villages for three years.

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Merit Prize

Cities of Sleep by Shaunak Sen – India | 2015 – 74 min.

Cities of Sleep takes us into a heady world of insurgent sleeper’s communities as well as the infamous ‘sleep mafia’ in Delhi where securing a safe sleeping spot often becomes a question of life and death for many people. The film trails the lives of Shakeel, a renegade homeless who has slept in a diverse range of improvised places, and Ranjeet, who runs the ‘sleep-cinema’ community.

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Jury Special Mention

Of Cats, Dogs, Farm Animals and Sashimi by Perry Dizon – Philippines | 2015 – 77 min.

An out-of-school Subanen boy named Dondon went to Sitio Tangalan in the barangay of Kawayan to work in a rubber plantation. At a tender age, he was already exposed to hardship and toil being a son to a seasonal harvester. This is a coming-of-age story, the contractual farm workers’ saga, the fisherfolks’ way of life and everything in between told in a free-flowing yet melancholic manner.

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Taiwanese Competition
Grand Prize

Le Moulin by Huang Ya-li – Taiwan | 2015 – 161 min.

After forty years of Japanese colonial rule, Taiwan’s first modern art group, Le Moulin Poetry Society, emerged in the 1930s with their poetic protest against the colonial power’s cultural superiority. Regarding the Surrealists as their absolute role models, Le Moulin poets composed poetry in an uncompromising and sophisticated style to confront the turbulent era they lived in.

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Merit Prize

Jade Miners by Midi Z – Taiwan | 2015 – 104 min.

In the end of 2012, when the Burmese army waged a war on Kachin Independence Army (KIA), many corporations working with the government on jade mining in the area were forced to stop their operation. Workers from all over the country flocked to the jade mines in Kachin State to dig illegally for jade. They risked their lives for a piece of valuable jade that will transform their lives.

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Chinese Documentary Awards
Grand Prize

The Road by Zhang Zanbo – China | 2015 – 95 min.

For more than three years, the director filmed the making of a section of a highway through a quiet village in Hunan, a province in central China where Chairman MAO was born. Local villagers and temples are forced to move and migrant workers endure very difficult working conditions, while the management of the construction company wants their share of the financial apple.

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Special Jury Prize

The Mountain by Su Hung-en – Taiwan | 2015 – 60 min.

For hundreds of years, Taiwan has been under different colonial rules. Each regime left their footprints on this island. Only the indigenous people of this island experienced them all. They were given different names during different periods of colonisation and their cultures have been changed. Through the life of a Truku elder, we see the history of aboriginal recertification movement.

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Author’s POV Award

Remote Control by Anonymous – France | 2015 – 47 min.

Tehran, June 2013. Massed in front of their TV, the Iranian people comment on the presidential campaign broadcast by national channels. After the post-election riots in 2009, do they still believe in politics? In the privacy of their homes, facing state propaganda and images of the West, Egypt or Syria, women and men freely talk about their hopes, anger and fears.

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Next Generation Award

Cities of Sleep by Shaunak Sen – India | 2015 – 74 min.

Wansei Painter – Tetsuomi Tateishi by Kuo Liang-yin, Fujita Shuhei – Japan, Taiwan | 2015 – 59 min.

TATEISHI Tetsuomi was born in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period in 1905. He was once regarded a promising painter, but his achievements were to be forgotten when he was repatriated to Japan at the end of WWII and lost most of his paintings. This film reveals his ambition and struggle and reflects the dramatic political, cultural and social change in Taiwan.

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AFF would like to remember the readers that the Taiwan International Documentary Festival is part of our partnership program (See all partners). We want to thank them for their support. We wish you had a nice festival this year. All the best for the next editions.