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Liberty Square

(Wood Lin / 2020 / 12 min / Taiwan)

In the memorial park for the great leader lies a square named ‘Liberty’. Built when Taiwan was under one-party rule, the square was initially named the ‘Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Square’ after the President of the Republic of China, who relocated to Taiwan after the overthrow of the Kuomintang regime in China during the Chinese Civil War, before it was renamed ‘Liberty Square’ in 2007. By gazing upon this place, filmmaker Wood LIN looks to uncover the legacy of authoritarianism that this dictator has left on contemporary Taiwan. Are those that play in this square aware that they do so under the statue of a dictator? Do the tourists that travel here know who they are paying their respects to? Interweaving audio from propaganda films with footage of the square, Liberty Square raises questions about the nature of history and democracy, neither of which are as simple as they may first seem.

2020 Golden Horse Film Festival – Chinese Global Vision
2021 Sheffield International Documentary Festival
2023 Festival du court métrage de Clermont-Ferrand – Country in Focus Taiwan

Wood Lin

Received his MA from the Graduate Institute of Sound and Image Studies at Tainan National University of the Arts. He is a filmmaker, film critic, writer, and festival organizer specializing in documentaries. He has served as program director of Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF) since 2013 and now is the program advisor of International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). The program “Imaging the Avant-Garde: Taiwan’s Film Experiments of the 1960s” he curated has toured to many film festivals and institutions like Anthology Film Archive, Thai Film Archive, Image Forum(Japan), EXiS(South Korea), etc. He also served as a juror in many international film festivals, like DokuFest (Kosovo), Sheffield Doc/Fest(UK), Verite Cinema (Iran), Golden Horse Awards (Taipei), Hong Kong International Film Festival, and Taipei Film Festival and many others.