UBC Asian Independent Cinema Showcase 2025 x TFAI Taiwan Docs
In Search of the Self: Documentary Shorts from Taiwan + Virtual Conversation with the Filmmakers

Date: Thursday, March 13, 2025
Time: 18:30-20:30
Venue: AERL 120, Aquatic Ecosystems Research Laboratory, UBC
Address: 2202 Main Mall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver | Map | Parking

Co-curated and co-presented by the Asian Independent Cinema Showcase and TFAI x Taiwan Docs, the program features three award-winning documentary shorts from Taiwan, exploring the theme of identity across various communities and contexts (indigenous, historical, and LGBTQ+).

Laha MEBOW's "32 Km - 60 Years" (32公里～六十年) guides us to an indigenous village that has been abandoned for more than sixty years. Mebow is an Atayal and the first female indigenous film director in Taiwan. Directed by HUNG Wei-lin, "K’s Room–the Creation and Destruction of the World" (K 的房間——關於世界的創造與毀滅) uses the "New English Grammar," one of Taiwan's most popular English grammar books, to reconstruct the mental status of the author during martial law. PAN Hsin An's "Leo ＆ Nymphia" (雙面曹里歐) follows twenty-five-year-old Leo who is also Nymphia the drag queen.

All three directors will join a virtual conversation following the screening.

The films will be shown in their original languages, with English subtitles provided.

Free admission. All are welcome.
Limited seats available. Registration required.

Read more about the UBC Asian Independent Cinema Showcase here.

Capstone Lecture
Taiwan Democracy and the Chinese Humanistic Tradition

Date: Thursday, March 6, 2025
Time: 15:00-17:00
Venue: Auditorium, Asian Centre, 1871 West Mall, Vancouver BC | Map | Parking

This is a Capstone Lecture, organized by UBC Department of Asian Studies, featuring Dr. Josephine Chiu-Duke on the occasion of her retirement

About the speaker:
Dr. Josephine Chiu-Duke is Professor of Chinese Intellectual History in the Department of Asian Studies where she has taught for over thirty years.

She is the author of To Rebuild the Empire: Lu Chih’s Confucian Pragmatist Approach to the Mid-Tang Predicament (2000), and In Search of Liberty: Lin Yusheng’s Life and Thought (2023).

Her edited works include Liberalism and the Humanistic Tradition – Essays in Honor of Professor Lin Yü-sheng (2005) [winner of Taiwan’s United Daily News award for best non-fiction book of 2005] and The Spirit of the Modern Intellectual Aristocracy: Lin Yusheng’s Recent Works in Intellectual History (2020).

This talk is free and open to the public. Registration is encouraged for planning purposes.

2024/2025 Dorothy L. Black Lecture
“Caring for Others: Intimacy and Asian Life in the Archives of Occupation” with Dr. Nadine Attewell

Date: Thursday, March 20, 2025
Time: 15:30-17:00
Venue: Buchanan Tower 323

Presented by The UBC Department of English Language & Literatures, the 2024/2025 Dorothy L. Black Lecture features Dr. Nadine Attewell (she/her/hers), Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and director of the Global Asia Program at Simon Fraser University (SFU).

Talk abstract:
Day after day, our social media feeds vibrate with the names of the killed, the missing, and the threatened in zones of slow and quick death across the globe. In this talk, Nadine Attewell will reflect on the intimate labour such lists index and also demand, thinking with archives generated at a different deathly conjuncture, during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong between 1941 and 1945. What forms of attention are required to make sense of these documents, at once spare and sprawling? Drawing on postcolonial, Black feminist, and Indigenous approaches to the archive, we will practice reading lists of the missing, dead, and imprisoned, of possible allies and likely traitors, of dependents and next of kin, as traces of people’s relation work for survival under conditions of extreme political, material, and bodily duress. To Japanese and British observers, Asian Hong Kongers’ practices of relation mattered principally insofar as they hindered or furthered the reproduction of imperial life. We will consider, rather, the significance of people’s efforts to care for one another in defiance of imperial norms of protectability, improvising supports for life in the face of state abandonment and mass death.

This lecture can be attended either in-person or online via Zoom.

This event is organized by UBC Department of English Language & Literatures; and co-sponsored by UBC Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies.

RSVP