Public Television Service Taiwan

A woman who believes she chose an unconventional path in her life is startled to find her children are stepping further beyond society's boundaries. Ai-tsao is a widow who is nearly 60 years old; her husband, over twenty years her senior, has been dead for nearly two decades, and Ai-tsao's life has settled into a comfortable routine of looking after her elderly mother and doting on her two adult children. Ai-tsao was born into a conservative and exclusionist minority family. After falling in love with a much older teacher of mainland descent, she abandoned her family and eloped. Decades later, her discovery that her son is gay and that her daughter has a black boyfriend makes her question choices in her past.

Two Indonesian poets meet at Tainan Park, using daytime experiences to craft poetry. Inspired by encounters and emotions, their creations take shape through night-time chanting, imagination, and action. Taman-taman (Park) unfolds a journey resembling an ancient fable, with untold stories hidden in the endless night. The storytellers become integral parts of the narratives as well.

Under constant regimes of discipline and incorporation, rituals, faiths, bodies, and the position of man and god all trend towards uprootedness, where we lose our links to the land and to others. Time is dissected into ever more infinitesimal parts. Those who could not keep up now appear within the gaze of a stopped frame. Regardless of man or god, all destruction and rebirth meet at this point in search of a safe corner.

Hindus celebrate 'Mrityubhoj', or the Death Feast, on the 13th day after a cremation as a remembrance for the departed soul, and also as a ritual to help the soul find heavenly abode. However, today this practice has become akin to a status symbol and a reflection of a family's social standing. This film takes a fly on the wall approach, following a family in the Chambal district in India, as they get ready to organize a death feast following the demise of their father. Caught between tradition, societal pressure, and prestige on the one hand and on the other hand, activists trying to put a lid on the pernicious practice of Mrityubhoj, especially for the poor, it tries to capture their predicament of being caught between a rock and a hard place.

Reality is a perception and it changes with perspective. Every individual who falls victim to a fatal accident is a character in their own right, but reduced to a mere number in the media! Inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Rashomon’, ‘Testimony of a Thread’ is a monologue collage in search of a face behind the numbers of the deadliest structural failure accident in modern human history.