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Curatorial Statement: 

Taiwan Film Festival in Scotland 2026 – From the Mountain, From the Sea

‘Cultural forms would be encoded in the landscape just as, according to the standard semiological approach to linguistic signification, conceptual representations are encoded in the medium of sound.’ 

Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill

Mountains, rivers, forests, and shorelines are often understood as natural formations, yet they are equally repositories of human experience. Generations leave traces upon them through labour, ritual, migration, memory, and storytelling. As Tim Ingold suggests, culture is not simply performed within a landscape; it is continuously inscribed into it. The terrain itself becomes a vessel of meaning. 

Rising from the collision of tectonic plates and encircled by the Pacific Ocean, Taiwan is an island defined by dramatic vertical and horizontal worlds. Mountain ridges run through its centre, while coastal routes have long connected it to neighbouring societies across East and Southeast Asia. For centuries, communities have settled, travelled, cultivated, worshipped, traded, and imagined their futures between these two elemental forces. Mountain and sea are not opposing realms; instead, they constitute a cultural geography through which people understand ancestry, belonging, loss, and transformation.

This understanding is far older than modern geography. The title From the Mountain, From the Sea also draws inspiration from the ancient Chinese text Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shan Hai Jing), a collection of myths, stories, and geographical imaginings compiled over two millennia ago. In its pages, mountains and oceans were more than physical landscapes; they were places where memory, belief, wonder, and knowledge took shape through storytelling. Distant peoples, spirits, beasts, and territories were described not through scientific observation but through mythic imagination. Before places were mapped or categorised, they were narrated. Before knowledge was organised into disciplines, it emerged through stories. Mountains and seas, therefore, function not merely as physical settings within this programme but as ways of knowing, remembering, and making sense of the world.  

If stories are one way of knowing the world, the films in this programme reveal how such forms of knowledge continue to emerge through lived relationships with landscape. In Spi (2025), director Sayun Simung returns to her Atayal mountain community, tracing family memories while reflecting on the continuing significance of Gaga, the ethical and spiritual framework that connects people to their ancestors, community, and environment. The film presents the mountain as a living archive of Indigenous knowledge, where memory resides not only in people but also in the landscapes they inhabit.

Questions of coexistence and stewardship appear in Fly! Mountain Hawk-Eagle (2026), directed by Liang Chieh-te. Following one of Taiwan's most iconic birds of prey and the fragile mountain ecosystems it inhabits, the film highlights the close relationship between ecological and cultural preservation, reminding us that biodiversity and cultural diversity often share the same conditions for survival.

Mountain landscapes also carry the sediment of history. In The Tales of the Tale (2025), directed by Song Cheng-ying and Hu Chin-ya, the former mining settlement of Houtong becomes a meeting point for folklore, labour history, and local memory. Through oral histories and local legends, the film evokes a landscape marked by extraction, abandonment, and remembrance, where traces of past communities remain embedded within the terrain.

A different understanding of landscape emerges in Somewhere in Time, River and Stone (2025), directed by Paulie Huang Chih-chia. Through a story of queer love and reincarnation, the film imagines mountains, rivers, caves, and stones as witnesses to encounters that transcend a single lifetime. Nature becomes a keeper of memory, preserving emotional and spiritual histories that lie beyond the reach of conventional historical narratives.

If mountains often evoke continuity, rootedness, and memory, the sea introduces movement, encounter, and transformation. Together they form the twin geographical imaginaries that have shaped Taiwan's cultural history.

As geographer Doreen Massey reminds us, ‘what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of relations, articulated together at a particular locus.’ Across centuries, journeys across water have connected Taiwan to wider networks of exchange throughout Asia and beyond. Oceans separate places, yet they also create relationships between them.

This maritime condition lies at the centre of The Waves Will Carry Us (2025), directed by Lau Kek-huat. Reflecting on the Malaysian Chinese experience, the film speaks to broader histories of migration and mobility within the Sinophone world. Here, the sea appears not as a boundary but as a space of connection and transformation, through which identities are continually reconfigured.

Where the Sea Breeze Blows (2024), directed by Chen Shao-chun, explores the emotional dimensions of these crossings. Moving between Penghu and Taiwan’s main island, the documentary meditates on grief, survival, and remembrance among those affected by suicide loss. The ferry route becomes a passage through memory itself, connecting absence and presence across the water.

Mobility takes another form in April (2025), directed by Freddy Tang. Bringing together a Filipino care worker, a formerly incarcerated son, and an ageing Hakka father, the film explores migration, labour, ageing, and care with humour and tenderness. It reveals how contemporary communities are increasingly shaped by movements and relationships that extend beyond national borders.

A different mode of storytelling appears in Praying Mantis (2025), directed by Joe Hsieh. Blending horror, fantasy, and dark allegory, the film recalls the imaginative spirit of the Classic of Mountains and Seas, where the boundaries between reality and myth remain deliberately unsettled. It reminds us that storytelling continues to offer ways of engaging with worlds beyond the ordinary.

If many of the films in this programme explore movement between places, Poetries From the Bookstores: Somewhere I Belong (2025), directed by Hou Chi-jan, considers how places themselves are continually produced through cultural practice. The independent bookshops featured in the film serve as gathering points where local histories, landscapes, and communities intersect, reminding us that mountains and seas are not only natural environments but also living cultural worlds through which people negotiate and explore. 

Across these films, From the Mountain, From the Sea proposes that Taiwan cannot be understood solely through political boundaries or demographic categories. It is history and mythology, ecology and labour, migration and memory woven together. The programme reveals Taiwan as a place where mountains and seas continue to shape ways of living, remembering, and knowing. For audiences in Scotland, whose own histories have been shaped by coastlines, islands, glens, and highlands, these films offer an opportunity to reflect upon how landscapes become carriers of memory, identity, and imagination. What emerges is not a map of Taiwan, but a constellation of stories, memories, and relationships through which people continue to dwell in the world.

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