Fluiding Stage’s camera journeys with a traveling puppet theater as it quietly criss-crosses people and places. Here is the ambience of an era left behind by a modernizing Taiwan. Home village of Singaporian director of Diminishing Memories, Lim Chu Kang was demolished by a state’s development plan. Gathering the memories of former villagers, the film laughs in the face of Singaporean “history.”

July’s Santa Rosalia fiesta in Palermo, Sicily celebrates the legend of a saint who saved the town from plague. Filmed in black and white, the cityscape is refine, the citizens jolly, and music gentle to the ear. Be fascinated by the richness and openness of the local culture at the heart of this vibrant festival.

Hsu Hsiao-ming focuses on four Asian laborers in Taiwan. Philippine house servants and Thai construction workers are the new nomads of more industrialized countries. Hsu skips the usual newsreel style and opts to delineate the homesick hearts of four individuals. The result is both touching and realistic.

After the devastating 1999 Taiwan earthquake, The House Masters records the efforts of the survivors living in Shihmen Village in Guosing Township, Nantou County as they try to help themselves on the road to recovery without media or government aid. The film follows the stubborn attempts of senior residents to go on living in tents. The activities of the residents in a housing complex called “The House Masters” also come into focus as the earthquake exposes the use of inferior construction materials. The elderly eventually pass away in loneliness, while the housing complex residents suing the construction company are confronted with legal contradictions. A final note adding that the trial is still in progress reminds us of the severe difficulties faced on the road from disaster to recovery.

Since causing an incident at eight years old, the director of The Spirit of 8 held fast to a feeling of guilt. At twenty-five, his camera reveals the process of freeing himself from that burden. In 2000, the Turkish authorities intervened in a hunger strike of political prisoners, causing them to suffer memory loss. Keep the Change challenges a Turkish society that has forgotten the incident.