An Island

Local politicians talk about what drives them during the election campaign. The space of a temple becomes a meeting point for a community. The gigantic blades of a wind turbine slice through the image. In Pei-Chin Lee’s meditative portrait of the island state of Taiwan, each shot is a continent in itself, with its own rhythm, perceptible duration, tides, coloring, and mood. The director filmed the countless forms of Taiwanese everyday life from the end of 2022 to the beginning of 2023 during the local elections – not coincidentally at a moment when the population had to engage with politics. (Dennis Vetter)