"Out/Marriage (失婚記)" Q&A Session with Director Kim-Hong Nguyen 阮金紅& Producer Tsung-lung Tsai 蔡崇隆

Director Kim-Hong Nguyen 阮金紅& Producer Tsung-lung Tsai 蔡崇隆

Format: One week screening (10AM 4th July to 10AM 11th July).

Q&A with Directors: Open 5 minutes before the event starting time.

As part of the 2020 SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies Summer School, we kindly ask that you register to attend .

If you selected to view this film when filling out the registration form you will receive a link to access the film online in early July.

This event will be held online through Blackboard Collaborate.

*Please be aware that all Summer School event times follow British Summer Time (BST)

2014 Taiwan International Documentary Festival

2013 Chinese Documentary Festival, Hong Kong

2013 Women Make Waves Film Festival, Taiwan

Synopsis

Vietnamese woman NGUYEN Kim Hong moved to Taiwan in pursuit of happiness and a cross-cultural marriage. However, she was forced to divorce her husband after years of physical abuse. In spite of language and cultural barriers, NGUYEN raised her daughter on her own and began to document four other immigrant women who shared a similar fate, capturing the daunting challenges as they each tried to stand on their own feet as a migrant or a single mother. After her divorce, NGUYEN began to film the stories of her immigrant friends. The shared identities and experiences helped her better connect with her subjects, and the female bonding and family connections make the film more emotionally stirring. What were once the director’s disadvantages in gender and national identity become a unique entry point in dissecting many of Taiwan’s social issues. Out/Marriage became a milestone as the first Taiwanese documentary filmed from the perspective of a new female immigrant.

Biographies

Director Nguyen Kim-Hong is a new immigrant in Taiwan from Vietnam. She was raised in rural countryside and was unable to complete elementary education due to poverty. In 2000, she was married to a man in Taiwan through a marriage agency, divorced in 2008 because she experienced domestic violence. She raised her daughter by herself since then. She was remarried in 2009 and started to volunteer with communities of new immigrants. Kim-Hong Nguyen won the first prize twice in the Beauty of New Immigrants Photo Contest and started to shoot documentaries since then. She received the grant from the 2010 Cloudgate Wanderer Project and another grant from the National Culture and Arts Foundation in 2011 to shoot her family story and other Vietnam sisters who experienced divorce. Out/Marriage is her first documentary and was nominated as Best Documentary in both Taipei Film Festival and South Taiwan Film Festival. It won the Best Newcomer Award of the South Taiwan Film Festival.

Director Tsung-Lung Tsai graduated with a law degree in bachelor from the National Chengchi University and a Master’s degree in Mass Communication from Fu Jen Catholic University in Taiwan. He also studied in the Film Studies programme at the University of East Anglia in the UK. He had worked as a journalist in print media, specialized correspondent for the corporate TV industry, and a documentary producer of Taiwan Public Television Service (PTS).

Tsai is currently an assistant professor of the Department of Communications at the National Chung Cheng University and works as an independent documentary producer and director. Tsai’s works take a rational analytical and humane approach to his subjects. Social issues regarding human rights, environmental concerns, and culture diversities have long been his concerns.

In 2006, Tsai and several documentary directors organized the first labor union for documentary workers in Taiwan. Tsai was the chief editor of the book “The Love and Hatred of Documentaries” which was published in 2009. It features the collected interviews of 12 middle-aged documentary directors in Taiwan. Tsai is endeavoring to promote the visibility and understanding of documentaries and has cultivated in training local image recoding experts as a lecturer. Some of his recent works were collaborated with his Vietnamese spouse, filming documentaries about new immigrants and migrant workers in Taiwan. He also participated in producing several films regarding current social issues, including judicial reforms, the Sunflower movement, and anti-air-pollution protests.

He is known for his film Killing in Formosa which won the Best Documentary for the 2001 Golden Harvest Awards. Behind the Miracle won the Best Documentary on Current Affairs of the Excellent Journalism Awards in 2002. My Imported Wife was invited to screen in the Best of INPUT, International Public Television Screening Conference in 2004 and was archived in the Museum of Television and Radio in New York. Oil Disease: Surviving Evil reveals the never-ending struggles of surviving victims of the 1979 PCBs Poisoning Incident. It won first prize of the 2008 South Taiwan Film Festival and was nominated in Taipei Film Festival, Kaohsiung Film Festival, and Earth Vision-Tokyo Global Environmental Film Festival. Sunflower Occupation, the latest film produced by Tsai, was nominee of the New Asian Currents Competition in the 2015 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.

Organiser: SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies

Contact email: ml156@soas.ac.uk

Sponsor: Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute