When Airplanes Fly Across

In 1949, the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan. But some went into hiding, waiting in the jungles of northern Burma and Thailand for orders from Taiwan. President Chiang Kai-Shek told them to keep hiding out in the jungle and to wait until the time was ripe to “retake mainland China” from the communists. They ended up waiting for fifty years and became a lost army.

During the Chinese Civil War, part of the KMT (Chinese Nationalist) forces retreated to the Thai-Burma border region. Under international pressure, most of the troops were evacuated to Taiwan in 1961, yet some remained. In northern Thailand and in central Taiwan, the two groups shared a similar destiny while they were apart. Now that over 50 years have passed, their differences gradually emerge, and their descendants are struggling with their identity.

As Taipei's house price-to-income (PTI) ratio has topped the world, Taiwanese people may work hard all their lives but still can't afford a costly apartment. Caught up in this money game of flipping properties, real estate agents hunt their targets in co-opetition, while being torn between the buyers and sellers. The film focuses on a real estate agent husband and his painter wife, and the couple's hectic life: the husband chasing after money with his silver tongue, while the wife producing art with her paint brush. Together, they orchestrate a landscape of Taiwan in this very century.

A group of guerrillas retreated from Burma to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War in 1961. They settled down and lived in virtual seclusion in four villages in the south of Taiwan. Now, fifty years later, excavators are digging uncanny holes on their land for the sake of economic development. To them, the days of forest battles have long gone, but another silent inner war has just begun.

The Taoyuan Aerotropolis project, Taiwan's largest urban development, forces nearly 10,000 families from their homes. As land is leveled and memories erased, residents struggle to preserve their roots. Powerless against economic progress, they cling to the fading traces of a homeland on the brink of disappearance.

The Taoyuan Aerotropolis project, located in the ocean, has witnessed the changes in Taiwan's military and economy from the post-war period to the present. Using the methodology of "historical image action," we spanned five years to witness the last glimpse of the memory of the homeland being razed to the ground, as well as the feelings of the relocated people as they built their homes and returned to their new homes.

Li Ze-yang's journey in music was bumpy yet full of colors. His musical collection serves as a historic witness to ethnic communities. His relentless editorial commitment proved a quintessential scarcity in the history of Taiwanese music.

Dance educator LIN Ssu-tuan is the first professional nude model in Taiwan in the 1950s and the 1960s, the muse for painters and sculptors in the art world, and the face for photographers’ salons around the world; in the end, she reversed the dynamics of the subject vs. the object and went on to perform her first solo modern dance in 1975, turning herself from the state of passiveness to an active educator of the art of dance. LIN is over 80 years old, but she still fervently pursues her ideals and passions with her body; her path of life is indeed a book of female art history that communicates with the society in Taiwan.