Winners Grounds:

A low budget film delivered with strong ambition and creative sincerity to produce a fully rounded work with above average professional performances across all aspects of production. The film is full of energy, with the cast of aboriginal actors, most of them non-professionals, mutually supporting each other to create a wonderful dynamic performance that expresses the lives and culture clashes of the aboriginal community in the most moving way.

Winners Grounds:

The director documents her own father as he is caught in exceptional times, sacrificed by his country, and stuck on the verge of class and gender distinctions. Despite his suffering amid the turbulence of lost countries, he continues to survive. He presents a distinctive attitude to life that, despite the weight of history, cannot be generalized.

Winners Grounds:

The film shows the isolated situation of an immigrant workers’ family using a simple, precise and sophisticated style. It assures the filmmaker’s solid talent and creates his interpretation of the world. It may be said that this film evokes the difficulties of refugees in various countries now.

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Using crash-test dummies as characters, and creating visual impact with colour, the film describes a limited life within limited conditions, but a life that leaves a mark. Although it is the story of a dummy, this short animation, presents the greatest dreams of common people in life.

Winners Grounds:

All the actors are new actors, however, their performances are natural and well controlled. The script and dialogue is interesting and moving but not sentimental or excessively sweet. The pace of the narrative and editing is sharp and the cinematography excellent. It is the director who has undoubtedly brought these elements together so impressively.

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Using an epic timeframe, the script captures the uniqueness of the passionate Tainan intellectual Yang Chih-Chang, and Le Moulin Poetry Society, evoking the world of Taiwanese literature. Digesting a huge amount of documents and quoting from an immense archive, the script faithfully presents the life of an avant-garde poet with calm and controlled emotion. The script shows not only hard work but precise historical selection.

Winners Grounds:

With The Tag-Along being a horror film, the key plot does not focus on the actor and he does not take the most screen time. Nevertheless, although his character is a quite ordinary estate agent who wants only to buy a house and spend time with his lover, River Huang captures, through small details of behaviour and composure, a meticulous embodiment of a young person oppressed by an ordinary life. He makes the audience feel empathy and remember his character. This is not easy.

Best Actress：Hsu Wei-Ning

Winners Grounds:

《The Tag-Along》 《White Lie, Black Lies》 《End of A Century: Miea’s Story》 Hsu Wei-Ning appears across both narrative feature and short films, each time leaving a strong impression, offering multiple dimensions. No matter whether it’s a darkly calculating character or one with guilty secrets buried deep, or excesses that border on self-destruction, she brings each character to life and fully demonstrating her range and diversity. Her potential is huge.

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Playing a cynical policeman who borders the ambiguous line between right and wrong, Chuang Kai-Hsun brings out the essence of these ambiguities. Facing corruption in both politics and policing, a deep web that bankrupts an entire police station, and facing his own relationship difficulties, Chuang Kai-Hsun balances the emotional changes and delicately portrays the dilemma of a policeman who is a human being.

Winners Grounds:

Jian Man-Shu captures the essence of a working hostess that shows the difficulties and lack of choices in her life. The break-up scene with her boyfriend delivers a complexity of emotions and subtle changes of mood that is extraordinary.

Winners Grounds:

Buya Watan, Watan Silan, SuyanPito, Esther Huang, Tsao Shih-Huei, Mudi, Lin Jing-Lang, Sharon Kao, Uni Yeh, Chuang Chuen-Hua All ten actors are new performers and yet they show a wonderful chemistry, a great energy, and a mutual support that is intensely moving. With such performances the film portrays an aboriginal culture and its life that is more complete and real.

Winners Grounds:

Award for an Outstanding Artistic Contribution (Music) A low-key melody strongly establishes the characters’ melancholy and uncertainty in the face of their reality. Given the subject’s situation and living space, the music creates a sonic field of proximity, making the audience feel directly present. With its fluidity, it creates a perfect combination of music and image.

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Award for an Outstanding Artistic Contribution (Editing) When the director is faced with new, young, and inexperienced actors, capturing performances through cinematography alone is hard to control and raises the bar making editing relatively difficult. Therefore, the fluidity and precise tempo of the editor’s work should be acknowledged.

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Award for an Outstanding Artistic Contribution (Cinematography) As well as using light to create rich texture and layered images, the cinematographer uses a precise and fluid lens to lead the audience deep inside the story and its complicated character relations and temporal changes. It’s a work of calm and deep effort, and of story-tellingwith a camera.

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Award for an Outstanding Artistic Contribution (Sound Design) A film that uses a mass of sound archive to recreate the state of things. The effort and concentration put into the film’s sound design is immense but more than that, the use of music and sound effects faithfully anchors both time and narrative, successfully recreating the world and its aura, that was yet to disappear, with great command of the symbolism of sound.

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This documentary doesn’t just look at Taiwan from a media perspective, it also brings out reflections on its society. Director Lee, who himself comes from a media background, explains clearly the key events of Next Media since the 90s, including their impact on the traditional press, and later to its system. The press jury believe this choice is not just because this a documentary about the press, but that the film has a perspective for everyone and issues that may be difficult are in fact in everyone’s life. The audience can deeply feel how close these are in relation to themselves. So in the spirit of the Press Award, as the information provider for society we unanimously agree to give the award to this film.

Winners Grounds:

The Taipei Documentary Filmmakers’ Union is actively involved in researching and publishing works on Taiwanese documentary; they have conducted oral history projects on such a large scale that a written record of more than one million Chinese characters is compiled. Moreover, it quickly and sensitively responds to all social movements in Taiwan. For instance, as soon as the students occupied the parliament in March 2014, an action later known as “Sunflower Movement”, the Union gathered dozens of its members and launched a crowfunding website to raise production fund. In six months, the documentary, Sunflower Occupation, was completed, and it is a visual record of an important student and civil rights moment in the Taiwanese history.