![On a warm May evening, the opening ceremony of the 14th edition of the Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF) was teeming with euphoria. Founded in 1998, TIDF takes seriously its motif of “re-encountering reality.” After two pandemic-hit iterations with online Q&As, this was the first time in six years that filmmakers and audiences had gathered in Taipei in person for the biennial festival. It was the second iteration to use the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute’s (TFAI) beautiful new home in the Xinzhuang District, west of the Tamsui River, for many of the programmed events. The late iconic Taiwanese documentarian and image-maker Chang Chao-Tang made sure our brains emerged twisted and rewired from his two extraordinary opening shorts, which screened in TFAI’s new state-of-the-art cinema. In Homage to Chen Da (2000), one of the island’s greatest folk singers is filmed playing the two-stringed yueqin and singing an everyday history of modern, rural, and municipal Taiwan. Chen Da, a wandering bard, accompanies himself inside and outside his village home, by the river, and at the much-lamented Scarecrow Restaurant in Taipei (unaware of its premature demise 45 years ago, I tried to pay my own homage one day and found an ugly office building in its place). Chen Da has no accompanying dialogue or explanatory text, simply letting the singer unspool his oral histories of Taiwanese life. The sonic and social resonances with Malian guitar music, the Delta blues, and the Baul music from my part of the world provided more than enough context for everyone in the theater. If Chen Da was poignant, gentle, and melancholy, Chang’s second short was nothing less than revelatory; when it was first broadcast on television in 1979, The Boat Burning Festival revolutionized Taiwanese documentary. Shot for the Kuomintang-owned China Television Company by Chang and a young Christopher Doyle in Sucuo Village in Tainan, the film documents a biennial Taoist ritual in which villagers decorate a large boat with intricate designs and figures. In a fervid procession of dancing and chanting, they raise the sail and set fire to the boat in a frenzy of religious ecstasy. Rarely have I been as conscious of a film as a visceral audiovisual experience. Chang wipes all diegetic sound, scoring the entire film instead to the prog-rock strains of Mike Oldfield’s album Ommadawn (1975). The split between audio and video jars, but is eerily apt, atomizing the very grain of cinematic expression into its separate components. The soundtrack was originally used without licensing, so this may well have been the film’s first legal theatrical screening in Taiwanese history. The Irish folk instruments (and glockenspiel) that soak Ommadawn in its otherworldly sense of new-age whimsy reinforce the crazed visuals of the boat burning ritual, manipulating them into crescendos and tranquilizing them into catharsis. This surreal juxtaposition transforms what might have been the merely anthropologically exotic into a hallucinatory, at times minatory, 22-minute epic—an acid trip without the acid. The lights came on to rapturous applause and we exited in a daze of bliss. Various stills from “The Boat Burning Festival” highlighting the reactions of attendees to the chaos of the event. Stills from The Boat Burning Festival. Courtesy of TIDF. Earlier in the evening, Chang’s son accepted the Outstanding Contribution Award on his late father’s behalf. Chang, a TIDF co-founder who died in April this year, would have been thrilled at the reaction to his maverick avant-gardism—there were three screenings of his double bill at the festival, and they all sold out. At a time when the Great Powers have been attempting to manipulate Taiwanese sovereignty like a pawn on the geopolitical chessboard, TIDF has made an explicit effort to hew to its mandate of artistic autonomy. Four days after the festival, the Chinese military announced “punishment” drills all around the island as a show of force against “separatist acts.” Festival staff used the awards ceremony to connect political independence to documentary exhibition. “We have a free and democratic society,” TFAI chairperson Arthur Chu said pointedly, “so we can screen all kinds of films.” When “the world is complicated and full of conflict,” program director Wood Lin insisted on the need to preserve cultural memory: “We exist because of those who remember us. That is the power of documentaries.” To reconfigure our approach to historical memory and the relationships between oikos and polis, TIDF included special sections based, broadly speaking, on archival footage. “Untitled Reel” exhibited amateur and small-gauge films from TFAI holdings—home movies that have traditionally been excluded from film history, such as those by a doctor in pre–World War II Taiwan, or by the local photographer Hsu Tsang-tse in the sixties. There were talks on the history of 9.5- and 8mm reels in Taiwan, and a live cinema event, in which musicians were invited to perform synchronously to a screening of This Is Not a Film by Deng Nan-guang (Huang Pang-Chuan and Chunni Lin, 2023), itself stitched together from found small-gauge footage presumably shot by the renowned photographer Deng Nan-guang. In a similar vein, the “Appropriate Appropriation: Archive and More” program exhibited widely varying appropriated films that, in the words of TIDF programmer Chen Wanling, “liberate memories.” The standout film in this section was also the winner of the Special Prize in the Asian Vision Competition, Damnatio Memoriae (2023), by the oft-banned Thai filmmaker Thunska Pansittivorakul. A 109-minute montage of newsreels and propaganda clips from modern Southeast and East Asian history, the film is a jigsaw of repression and massacre, from the White Terror in post-1949 Taiwan to the execution of the Burmese politician and hip-hop artist Zayar Thaw in 2022. Warbling through the decades is the music and public persona of Teresa Teng, the Eternal Queen of Asian Pop, who in her short life became both a tool of propaganda and a referent for resistance in East and Southeast Asia. In the Audience Award–winning My Stolen Planet (dir. Farahnaz Sharifi, 2024), private records—old photos and videos of the filmmaker’s own family and friends, as well as 8mm footage shot decades ago by strangers and bought in the video stores of Tehran—are transformed into a mosaic of public memory. This slice of microhistory also won the Next Generation Award, organized in tandem with a local education program and decided by eighteen teenage jurors. The exercise endeavors to train future jurors and let younger people participate in a cultural practice that is too often a prerogative of age and experience. It is TIDF’s clearest expression of the direction it hopes to map for creative freedom in the region: forward. That direction is also significant for the Visionary Award, given to films that, as one juror told me, “chart a course forward, taking artistic risks along the way.” Both films chosen—The Clinic (dir. Midi Z, 2023) and Taman-taman (Park) (dir. So Yo-hen, 2024)—“were remarkable for all the ways they resisted classical interpretation, and instead depicted closed worlds operating under their own idiosyncratic rules.” Winner of the Special Jury Prize in the Visionary category, as well as the Grand Prize in the Taiwan Competition, Taman-taman is a quiet exercise in metanarrative. Two poets, both Indonesian immigrants, meet in Tainan Park to recite poetry, eavesdrop, invent, digress, and pretend to broadcast the gossip, anecdotes, tidbits, rumors, and short stories of migrant workers in Taiwan. Meditative and experimental and operating in a unique spatiotemporal continuum, the film is both moving and immobile. “It’s been going around in circles,” one of the protagonists complains at one point. “This film is getting more and more unclear.” On the other side of obscurity often lies epiphany. One evening, at the Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, a former military base that’s been converted into blocks of performance and lecture spaces, I experienced a singularly exhilarating event that converted confusion into fun. In “Jamming with Archive: Re-coding,” five groups of artists were let loose in what used to be an old mess hall for soldiers. With access to TFAI’s collection of 6,000-plus propaganda newsreels from the KMT-era Taiwan Film Culture Company, the artists performed acts of what the film scholar Jaimie Baron calls “archival ventriloquism”—reusing, misusing, and deconstructing these clips in real time to spark new sensations and discombobulate the spectatorial gaze. Using multiple sound consoles, open-source software, machine learning, and on-site sensing, and forcing the audience to keep changing places by turning toward different screens, erstwhile political assets were transformed into audiovisual art. “As the archives become digitized,” Wood Lin told me in the rapturous darkness, as windows of text vibrated into reels of political rallies to pulsing electronica, “propaganda becomes code.” For the finale, the artist duo YouNuts flashed black-and-white newsreels and released white balloons into the audience in an echo of the ones that used to be sent toward mainland China decades ago with supplies and propaganda. We started kicking and punching balloons at each other, playing with them like children. Inflating menacingly right in front of the screen, an enormous white balloon itself became a diaphanous, bulbous screen (till it finally exploded, almost perfectly in sync with everything going black). By the end, balloons were popping, and people were squealing with joy. A dark, crowded room with a screen showing a mans face. There are multiple balloons in front of the screen refracting the man's face. The audience sits and stands around the consoles managing the screening. TIDF event “Jamming with Archive: Re-coding”. Courtesy of TIDF. The C-Lab, as it’s commonly called, also played host to a masterclass by the Slovakian filmmaker Peter Kerekes, four of whose films were screened out of competition. His latest, 107 Mothers (2021), falls somewhere between documentary and fiction, “a bastard,” as he described it. The docudrama is populated by a mix of Ukrainian actors and real prisoners of Prison 74 in Odessa, where the children of female convicts are allowed to be with their mothers till their third birthday. Kerekes told me about an “interesting paradox,” wherein the scaffolding of fiction let more reality in: “All the guards tried to make the prison look nicer when we were filming it like a documentary. But ‘fiction’ helped me make a more realistic film about prisons.” Kerekes’s sardonic Cooking History (2009), an alternate (culinary) history of modern warfare, explores the role of military cooks in various 20th-century European conflicts. Rolling out to its logical extreme the old adage about an army marching on its stomach, the film poses an intriguing question to people who do not think of themselves as killers, from SS line cooks and Tito’s personal chef to the Frenchmen who fed the soldiers who killed Algerian rebels: if army cooks stopped cooking, might war disappear? Disappearances of a more historically concrete sort were the subject, in its Asian premiere, of the Grand Prize–winning The Trial (dir. Ulises de la Orden, 2023), an archival film that is as relevant today as when the source material was recorded in a Buenos Aires courtroom in 1985. Relatives and compañeros of dozens of those “disappeared” during the Dirty War give chilling testimony against the commanders of the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983. Masterfully edited into a harrowing document of the Trial of the Juntas from over 500 hours of U-matic television footage that was never properly broadcast, The Trial made for severely uncomfortable, utterly gripping, and somewhat cathartic viewing. For three hours, I heard everyone around me sobbing. They probably heard me too. The biological need to remember trauma was a feature of much of the programming. In Sofía Paoli Thorne’s tactually sensuous Guapo’y (2023), Celsa Ramirez Rodas, an artist who was imprisoned 40 years ago by the Paraguayan secret police, strews rosemary to remember her cellmates (“They say it’s good for memory”) and puts herb poultices on her body to ease the pain of torture. Like many of the women in 107 Mothers or The Trial, Ramírez Rodas also gave birth in prison, and memories of dictatorships are recalled and relived on the body. There were memories, too, of catastrophe (Bye Bye Tiberias, dir. Lina Soualem, 2023) and lost childhoods (Kix, dir. Dávid Mikulán and Bálint Révész, 2024), and remarkable anthropologies of (neo)colonialism (Canuto’s Transformation, dir. Ernesto de Carvalho and Ariel Kuaray Ortega, 2023; Crossing Voices, dir. Raphaël Grisey and Bouba Touré, 2022; Where Zebus Speak French, dir. Nantenaina Lova, 2023). Some filmmakers answered postscreening questions in keffiyehs. One night, over taro and tapioca balls on shaved ice, folks from the Taipei Documentary Filmmakers’ Union urged festival guests to support unions. New memories were made in public parks around Linsen North Road, the old dormitory area for colonial-era Japanese soldiers. Near festival venues flanking Taipei’s red-light district, filmmakers would collapse on grassy knolls in 4:00 a.m. conversations with convenience-store cocktails (many mixed admirably by the Armenian filmmaker Silva Khnkanosian, a former bartender whose Far From Michigan [2023], filmed in bomb shelters in Nagorno-Karabakh, screened in competition). “All things considered,” juror Joost Daamen, senior programmer at IDFA, told me with a wistful smile as he left for the airport, “this comes close to being the perfect festival.”](https://fundboostonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Taiwan-Intl-Doc-Festival-2024-Reuse-Reorient-and-Remember.jpg)
Charlie Shackleton describes The Afterlight as “a film that’s designed to be lost.” A meditation on impermanence and mortality, consisting of imagery of deceased performers taken from hundreds of films, the all-archival feature incorporates that idea into its very being. It deliberately exists as a single 35mm print that will naturally degrade over time and with every showing. When that print is gone, no more Afterlight.
But recently, the film was lost in a different way than intended. Since its premiere at the BFI London Film Festival in 2021, it’s been on a continual touring schedule, shipping to various venues around the world. Sometime in late May, in transit from the UK to Portugal, the print went missing. Fortunately, less than two weeks after Shackleton announced this, he had a happy update: The Afterlight had finally turned up at its destination, just much later than it was supposed to. In the interval between those two announcements, Documentary spoke with Shackleton over Zoom about what the loss (even temporary) of The Afterlight means for the overall project. We then spoke again after the film was rediscovered. These two conversations have been combined, edited, and condensed for time and clarity.
DOCUMENTARY: How are you feeling? It’s been about a month, right? Are you in the acceptance stage?
CHARLIE SHACKLETON: I feel oddly sanguine, so maybe I’m not even at acceptance, maybe I’m still in denial. I do feel like there’s still a reasonable chance it’ll show up eventually, but even if it doesn’t, I feel oddly resolved or reconciled to that reality. But maybe it just hasn’t hit me yet.
D: For people who don’t know, what are the actual logistics of shipping film reels?
CS: The typical way that a film print is shipped is in Goldberg cases, which are those octagonal containers you sometimes see in cinema lobbies—or more likely cinema museums, at this point. My print had a slightly more heavy-duty bright orange Peli [Pelican] case. In theory, it’s harder to lose and better protected against whatever conditions it may currently be sitting in. But obviously it’s a big wide world full of enormous FedEx distribution centers, and these things do still get lost.
D: It was traveling to Lisbon. Is there anything to the story besides “FedEx lost it”?
CS: The last screening it had was at the Hyde Park Picture House, which is a beautiful old cinema in Leeds in the north of England. There was a good couple-of-weeks gap between that and the next screening, which was due to be at the Cinematheque in Lisbon. It was collected from Hyde Park by FedEx, and it definitely made it as far as the Bradford sorting office, and that was the last time it was scanned. For a while, there were just unspecified delays. And then once FedEx actually looked into it, they realized they didn’t know where it was. There was a brief claim that it had turned up at Portuguese customs, but then that was retracted. Subsequently, Portuguese customs said they never had it.
D: It isn’t unusual for prints to get lost in transit. I’ve been to screenings where they had to show a DCP because the reels were delayed. Do you have any recourse for resolving a problem like this?
CS: Essentially not. I wasn’t the one who arranged the shipment, so most of the communication with FedEx has been happening on my behalf by the cinema. I think they phoned FedEx and made an impassioned case that this was a particularly irreplaceable item. I think FedEx did agree to move it out of “lost” status and into whatever is one step down from that, which I guess is “We’re still having a look.” But I don’t really know what that means, if there are people in these sorting offices looking around, seeing if they can spot it. We sent them photos of the case.
Based on stories people have told me, if these things turn up at all, it’s months or years later when someone’s clearing out a particular room and stumbles upon it. If that happens, the case has my name and address and phone number on it, and they will hopefully have a way to get it back to me. But I have no sense of how likely that is.
D: Besides your contact information that’s on the packaging, what’s in the package that indicates what the film is? Is that not even a concern, since generally the only people handling the film know what the deal is?
CS: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it’s four reels in a case, but the average person opening it up might not even know it was a film print if they have no context for what that looks like. If you open the cans, you can see the physical film, and most people could probably work it out by that point. It says the name “The Afterlight” on the cans, so I suppose if they Googled it, they’d find out what the film was. And my name and address are on each of the cans as well.
All of this is leading me to have a slightly greater belief that it will show up, however long it takes, because I just figure: Well, it exists somewhere. It has a physical form, unless it fell off the back of a plane or into an incinerator. I’m cautiously optimistic, whether that’s foolish or not.
D: You’ve thought through a lot with this project. Had you considered the possibility of something like this at some point?
CS: It was always a possibility. If anything, it seems the more likely avenue for the film to become lost, at least in its early years. Typical damage to a film print through projection is fairly incremental and minor, especially these days, when the only people still doing analog film projection are pros and people who really care about it. You don’t really get so many terrible projection mistakes anymore. I always knew that if the film was going to become un-screenable in its early life, it would be through being misplaced as opposed to damaged.
That said, the more times I shipped it without incident, the more confident I became in that process and the less I worried when it was out of my hands. If anything, it seemed less loss-prone than all the other films I’ve made, which exist on hard drives in various places. It’s a bit of an act of faith that when I plug them in, the film’s still going to be there, the file’s not going to be corrupted, and it’s still going to play or be able to be sent wherever it needs to go. By contrast, The Afterlight felt so material, so literally weighty and bulky, that I couldn’t quite imagine it going missing.
D: Had the film shown any evidence of deterioration over the course of its screenings to date?
CS: Yeah. So, as is typical with a film print, the damage that had amassed thus far tended to be at the beginnings and ends of the reels, because those are the parts that get handled most. It had all those telltale speckly patches every 20 minutes, as well as some more concrete damage. There were some pretty gnarly track lines at the beginning of the second reel, which would’ve been the result of some sort of misalignment with a projector. One projectionist burned the countdown on the first reel and then didn’t confess to it. I only found out several screenings later, when another projectionist pointed it out. They clipped out the three affected frames, which incredibly happens to be three sixes. I had this quite demonic little memento of these three burned sixes. But the print is still in pretty good condition.
D: The Afterlight is a sort of synecdoche for the broader experience of physical film—of deterioration, exhibition, preservation. Films being lost is also part of that experience. But so is rediscovery. That would be a fitting further development—one that I think we’re all hoping for.
CS: Totally. I mean, it feels like a fitting new stage in the project’s life for it to have become lost. I have obviously also imagined the possibility of this eventual rediscovery, which I think for it to have its real mythological impact needs to be at least a year or two, maybe decades down the line, as opposed to next week, in which case I think people would feel like I’d made a bit of a song and dance about nothing.
It’s a strange thing, because even though it is now lost, it’s hard to say what real difference that makes from when it wasn’t. Because there was only one print, the odds of me seeing it again anytime soon were quite low. The odds of you seeing it again anytime soon were quite low. The people who it’s truly been lost for are the ones who were going to see it in Lisbon and didn’t, and then the people who would’ve seen it at the two or three screenings I had booked in for the coming months. Maybe this is why the emotional impact of it being lost hasn’t kicked in, because its being found was so contingent already. I guess the prospect of rediscovery is similarly strange, because if it’s rediscovered tomorrow, what does that mean to you until it comes to New York? Is there any real difference? The film already had such a strange, tentative existence.
D: I can’t fully recall what contextualizing information there is within The Afterlight itself as to what its deal is—whether there are titles and such. If your contact information was somehow fully separated from the reels, how easy would it be for someone who found them to trace them to you?
CS: On a physical level, the four reels are numbered—not just on the cans, but on the film itself. Anyone who found it would in theory have the information they need to screen it. There’s a title on the front, there are credits on the end. In some ways it looks like a traditional film. But as to what it would mean to someone who found it, that is quite reliant on the information that remains available about its creation and its context and its meaning.
Funnily enough, a couple of months ago, a friend gave me a big box of 16mm prints she was getting rid of. I had a couple of friends around, and we sat in my living room and we screened a few of them as a potluck movie night. One of them was a student film from 25 years ago that was actually great. It was called Thread, and we looked up the director to find more information, because it was just like the scenario you described. It had credits, but there was no real indication of the context of its making. We found out that the director, Susannah Gent, is now a film professor at a university in England. I got in touch with her, and lo and behold, it turned out she had been looking for the print for years. So I sent it back to her. Having even the scant information about the film available online meant I could connect it to its wider context. Obviously, I’m hoping the karmic value of me having done that just before my own print went missing is going to see its return to me.
D: If nothing else, I hope this story raises awareness about how tenuous so much of our media is—even if it doesn’t exist on a single print.
CS: I hope so. It’s funny, actually, because it’s now on Wikipedia’s list of lost films, which basically ends in the ’80s, with my film as the lone example from recent decades. But we know that’s not true. More films are being lost now than at any point in the last 50, 60 years. It’s just that we don’t know in most instances, the sheer number of even fairly significant independent festival circuit movies that exist solely on a hard drive in someone’s office somewhere, and next time they go to look, it may not be there. The question isn’t whether they’re lost, but how many are.
***
Not long after, the film reels were found. We hopped back on Zoom for a brief follow-up call with Shackleton.
D: Congratulations! That didn’t take nearly as long as we feared.
CS: I can’t even remember what the differential in days was between us talking and it turning up, but it felt like a matter of minutes.
D: Were they able to provide any details on why it was waylaid and where it had been during that time?
CS: Not yet. I’m going to try to find out, but I imagine it’s just the mysteries of the FedEx system. But now it’s at the cinematheque.
D: Will the theater still be able to show it?
CS: I think they’re hoping to. It’s still there, but obviously the screening date was weeks ago, and they’re going to try to squeeze it into their schedule.
D: We actually didn’t touch on this before, but how do you insure the print when you ship it?
CS: I always just get—and encourage other people to just get—the minimum coverage, because the more value you declare, the higher the cost of shipping. Ultimately, it’s literally irreplaceable, so it would be nice to have a big payout if it got lost, but that would come at the cost of every single instance of shipping it being vastly more expensive. So it would’ve been 200 euros, whatever the standard coverage is for a FedEx shipment.
D: How has this episode impacted the film’s planned tour?
CS: Fortunately, there was a gap in the screening schedule, so the only one it missed was the one it was on its way to. And like I say, hopefully they are going to be able to do that, just delayed. It’ll ship straight on from Lisbon to the next one. The film’s been found, but not in a sense that I really have any physical relationship to. Because typically it goes from place to place, and only if there’s a big gap does it return to me and live behind my sofa.
D: Now that this has happened, do you feel any trepidation about the idea of shipping it again? Are there any further precautions you’ll take?
CS: Weirdly, I think maybe I’ve become cocky through it having turned up, but I don’t feel that fazed by it. My producer is absolutely adamant that we buy one of those AirTags and put that in the case, though. But I don’t know if you’re allowed to do that, if that interferes with FedEx’s system in some way. The way those work is they use iPhones in the vicinity to identify where the tag is. But then, I think because they don’t want anyone to use them to stalk people, if one’s near your iPhone for more than 10 minutes, you get a notification. So possibly that would mean that a FedEx driver would be bombarded with notifications. But then maybe that’s happening left and right. I’m sure we’re not the only people who thought of this.
D: As I said before, the film is a synecdoche for the wider experience of celluloid. And now we’ve seen in miniature the process of a film being lost and found, which is kind of beautiful
CS: Yeah. Very miniature, obviously. It felt quite humiliating when the Wikipedia entry got updated more or less immediately after I put on Twitter that the print had been found—“However, it was found later that month.” I feel the urge to clarify that it was lost for more than a month; I just waited a while before I told anyone. But yeah, it does look like I made a fuss about nothing. It’s probably the shortest period in history that a film has been lost.