YIDFF`99 web-Offical catalog


Taiwanese director Wu Yii-feng, known for his films Moon Children (1990) and Chen Tsai-gen and His Neighbors (1996), and his production team Full Shot Workshop have been conducting film education workshops in Taiwan since 1994. In that time they have gone through several changes, shifting from an emphasis on making films to educating filmmakers. They have expanded into the countryside, and gone from small group activity to building regional networks. In Japan, director Hara Kazuo founded Cinema Juku five years ago as a place where young people could discuss cinema. In bringing together these two projects, we will attempt a thorough discussion of filmmaking movements. During an intense three days the two filmmakers along with the members of each group will bring forward the problems they face and talk about themes such as "collaborative film, film collaboratives" and "popular documentary movements."
What distinctions and restrictions lie between professional documentary filmmakers and those who make documentaries as an avocation? And who decides those distinctions? How should the relationship between filmmakers and the subjects of their films be handled? What sort of relationships might be produced between documentary works and the settings of real life? We need your views and experience. Friends from all over the World! We want to hear your arguments and questions. We at Full Shot look forward to sharing our experiences in filmmaking with all of you. - Wu Yii-feng Full Shot Workshop: Film director Wu Yii-feng established the documentary film making group Full Shot Workshop in 1988. Making the TV documentary series, Lights of Human Heart and participating in the movement to screen Moon Children in schools were motives to gather together students who wanted to study filmmaking. That is how Full Shot started as a workshop to train documentary filmmakers. In 1995, Full Shot started to receive government support for the workshop from an agency that supports cultural endeavors. Taiwan's history of documentary film is not as long as Japan's; it's still in its nascent period. Because of that, however, its films are full of a youthful energy of which I am envious. By contrast, when I think about documentary film in Japan, I am full of bitter doubts over whether we have passed our prime and lost our energy.... I have the fortune this year to come to the magnet that is Yamagata. I have made a promise with Director Wu Yii-feng to do our best in dialogue.- Hara Kazuo Cinema Juku: Film director Hara Kazuo founded this project with a call to all young people in Japan. In 1995, it began as a retreat at the Hagi International Festival of Film Art in Yamaguchi Prefecture. The group now invites film directors and producers as guests in accordance with each year's theme, and studies film under these guest lecturers in a retreat setting. In an intensive workshop in the summer of 1998, Juku members made their first documentary film, My Mishima, which was finished in 1999.
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