Coda: On Palestine at TIDF

This is an informal coda to my Public Parking article on TIDF. Given the topics it discusses, I really wanted to mention another TIDF program, Palestine and Its Archiveless Archive, which addressed the violence of Zionist settler-colonialism and Israel’s looting of Palestinian archives.

This didn’t happen for two reasons. First, I would have blown way past my assigned word count. Second, I didn’t watch any films from the Palestine program, since I had seen many of them before. I figured my limited time in Taipei was better spent watching new-to-me films (and that I should prioritize writing about new-to-me films). I did attend a panel discussion between the invited Palestinian filmmakers, and I met people in the Palestine solidarity movement in Taiwan, some of whom assisted with putting the program together. Still, I had limited engagement with this strand of the festival and the discussions surrounding it. Yet there are many thoughts (and questions) I have—not about specific films, but about what it means to show Palestinian films in Taiwan, in these times. Hence this coda…

In a way, Palestine was at the center of TIDF this year. Beyond the Palestine program, the festival’s key art referenced Mohanad Yaqubi’s 2016 film Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory (it was quite something to see this on banners across Taipei), and its opening night featured Saeed Taji Farouky’s lecture-performance, Death Is Certain but Not Final vol. IV, which explored the presence of absence in radical filmmaking. I would go as far as saying that this level of public institutional support for Palestine is unprecedented in Taiwan’s film sphere—though TIDF was careful not to make overt political statements when speaking to the media. (By contrast, the Women Make Waves International Film Festival posted an explicit statement in support of Palestine in 2024, when it showed a program of Palestinian and Arab films co-organized by Taiwanese artist Hong-Kai Wang.)

It didn’t feel like TIDF was merely reacting to a headline-grabbing situation. Through extensive research, they developed a sharp and thoughtful angle (working with, around, and against archives) on Palestinian cinema. They published an exceptional booklet for the program, which contextualizes the films through newly translated texts by, and interviews of, Palestinian filmmakers. By screening films like Yaqubi’s R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity (2022), they also placed the Palestinian struggle for liberation within, as Cici Peng notes, “a broader continuum of anti-imperial struggle” across Asia. Notably, TIDF is organized by Taiwan’s national film archive, the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute. Palestine might not have its own national film archive (a condition which many films in the program meditate on), but for ten days, it did, in a sense, have an archive to call home, which shared its stories and struggles.

It can hardly be said that Taiwan’s leaders show the same friendliness towards Palestine. On the contrary, Taiwan has long been one of Israel’s staunchest supporters. Taiwan’s politicians have repeatedly and aspirationally compared Taiwan to Israel, and the DPP has only deepened ties with Israel since October 2023, while almost entirely disregarding Palestinians. Jordyn Haime, in her newsletter Der Vayter Mizrekh (which excellently covers Jewish life and history in China and Taiwan), lays all of this out:

Taiwan’s representative to Israel, Abby Ya-ping Lee, has told me that Taiwan aims to show Israel that it is a “reliable partner” as China’s repeated condemnations of its actions in Gaza stress the Israel-China relationship. In the years since the start of Israel’s war, Taiwan has received an increasing number of Israeli parliamentary delegations—a total of 3 this year alone. In July, the Israeli Knesset passed a symbolic resolution in support of Taiwan’s participation in international organizations, calling Taiwan “a true friend of Israel.” But perhaps the boldest move was Lee’s financial pledge [in 2025] to a medical facility on an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank. Though the donation was justified as an embodiment of the WHO’s values despite Taiwan’s unjust exclusion from the organization… International law experts say the move constituted an unprecedented endorsement of Israel’s illegal occupation unmatched by any other country, even the United States.

The Palestine solidarity movement in Taiwan, though led by a dedicated coterie of activists, is marginal. As New Bloom’s Brian Hioe points out, pro-Palestine protests are small and attended by foreigners, making it easy for the government to ignore them. Most Taiwanese media engages in “both-sidesism” when covering Israel/Palestine, and many Taiwanese progressives have framed Taiwan’s complicity in the genocide in Palestine as a “humanitarian issue” to be opposed primarily because it damages Taiwan’s image, rather than articulating a more robust critique of capital and US imperialism and militarism’s role in sustaining it. This is unsurprising, given Taiwan’s reliance on the US for military defense against China—radical pro-Palestinian positions are pigeonholed as a proxy for pro-China politics.

Clearly, there are political stakes involved in giving Palestinian films such a large platform in Taiwan. I’m curious to know how the festival navigated these tensions. Based on my interactions with the Palestinian guests, I got the impression that TIDF succeeded in allowing them to speak uncompromisingly, and that they enjoyed the opportunity to connect with people in the solidarity movement. Suhel Banerjee, director of CycleMahesh (2024), praised TIDF for this during his acceptance speech at the awards ceremony: “There are very few places in the world right now where Palestine and films about Palestine would be given such importance, and conversations around that can happen. Certainly not in India, certainly not in the Western world.” Unlike festivals in the US, where it feels like discussion of Palestine is heavily scrutinized, micromanaged, or outright censored, TIDF felt refreshingly supportive.

These are my impressions as a foreigner who can’t speak Mandarin. I can’t say how people in the solidarity movement in Taiwan felt, and it would be presumptuous to speak over them. I’d love to know what they thought the festival did or didn’t do well, whether they felt like the Palestine program was useful for their organizing efforts, and whether they felt TIDF was successful in mobilizing more people to speak about Palestine—if they were able to instigate conversations outside the festival, in the more hostile political milieu surrounding it.

The very existence of the Palestine program speaks to the paradoxes inherent in cultural diplomacy in Taiwan. Because Taiwan is shut out of many international organizations, one way it increases its presence in the world is by investing heavily in cultural diplomacy—which TIDF is certainly an example of. It’s unthinkable that a US festival with the level of public funding that TIDF has would show any solidarity with Palestine. But Taiwan’s government has been pragmatic, casting a wide net to counter China’s influence. Though they are overwhelmingly pro-Israel, support for this kind of multi-directional cultural diplomacy perhaps inadvertently seeds the development of more radical critiques which can challenge government policies.

Another example of this is Taiwan’s Austronesian diplomacy, which it pursues on the basis of its shared cultural and linguistic heritage with other Pacific islands. The government aims to push Pacific island nations to ally with Taiwan over China, and to recognize Taiwan. In other words, they are practicing diplomacy from a traditional, geopolitical “state-to-state” standpoint. But the resulting interactions of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples with those in places like Guam, Fiji, the Marshall Islands, Aotearoa, and Hawaiʻi has laid the groundwork for a more radical politics of indigeneity in Taiwan which more fundamentally questions the claims of Chinese and Taiwanese settler nationalism.

Though Palestine and Taiwan are both under threat from larger imperialist powers, I often find it disingenuous when well-meaning people make direct parallels between them. After all, they are on opposite sides of a world order inscribed by US imperialism. But one key similarity they do share is that they are nations engaged in the difficult work of carving out their agency from a non-sovereign position. They’ve needed to look beyond models of state diplomacy towards other ways of inspiring people to support their struggles—and this opens the door to relationships forged through “people-to-people” diplomacy which subversively expand our political imagination beyond the nation-state system. Maybe this is what is most meaningful about encountering Palestine in Taiwan—this as-yet-unrealized promise of collective liberation.