2024 Short | Tayal Forest Club

7pm, Saturday 15th September

Screening before All We Imagine As Light  

TICKETS & INFO

2023 | Laha Mebow | Taiwan | UC15+

"Ancestors! We’ve gotten stuck here. Can you help us find the way home?” pleads Yukan, a Tayal teenager lost in the forests of his forefathers.

Bullied at school and weighed down at home by his dad’s drinking, Yukan is eager to escape it all. When his best friend, Watan, invites him on a hike, a physically and emotionally bruised Yukan grabs his machete, and the two boys head into the woods. But this isn’t just any hike, or just any woods —as Yukan and Watan’s youthful overconfidence runs them up against the realities of nightfall in the dense and mountainous Tayal homelands, other forces begin to reveal themselves. Before they can find a way home, these two young Tayal men must first humble themselves enough to learn the lessons that the land itself has to offer.

In Tayal Forest Club, director Laha Mebow — Taiwan’s first Indigenous female film director and the first Taiwanese and Indigenous filmmaker to win the Golden Horse Award for Best Director — shares a coming-of-age tale that interweaves Tayal characters, settings, and symbols with the complexities arising from her community’s interactions with contemporary society.