Looking For?, an internationally acclaimed documentary this year and directed by Taiwanese director Tung-yen Chou, will be screened in Seattle International Film Festival on May 21st and 22nd, 2018. The director will personally attend the screening and join the Q&A session that follows.
Looking for? is a common question people ask on gay dating apps, as well as a question that Chou asks himself frequently over the years in his career as a theatrical and visual director. Over four years of travelling and interviewing gay men, Chou presents the film Looking for? as a documentary. Following its release last year, the film was immediately nominated in the Taipei Film Festival and the Golden Horse Film Awards as best documentary, invited to be screened at Taiwan International Queer Film Festival and the Hong Kong Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, and selected as the film to open the Love & Pride Film Festival in Singapore.
Chou has focused his career on visual and theatrical works, as demonstrated by the abundant visual design elements he presented in Cloud Gate Dance Theatre’s latest project Formosa. In addition to simply interviewing different people, Looking for? delicately conveys sensitive consideration for others through the conversations. Chou starts out with the usage and sharing of dating apps in the film, and goes in depth with gay men around the world with dialogue about survival rules on the internet, the success and failure dating stories, as well as with intimate confessions of their desire for love, their loneliness, sadness, and self doubt and self value.
In the four years of production, Chou also turns the camera towards himself as he searches for his own love story and develops his own relationships through dating apps. As the Internet changes day by day and dating apps mature, “Looking for?” has become the question of the fast food Internet culture. To Chou, Looking for? is not merely how conversations begin on gay dating apps, as it is a question that returns to the roots of one’s self, and also an existential question that transcends gender and culture.
Besides Looking for?, The Bold, The Corrupt, and The Beautiful, the winner of 2017 Golden Horse Award for Best Feature Film, Best Leading Actress and Best Supporting Actress, is also scheduled to be screened at SIFF on May 19th, May 26th, and May 28th. Written and directed by Ya-Che Yang, this film depicts how Madame Tang colludes and mediates between the government and the private businesses for the benefits of her all-female family. One case does not go according to plan, and an entire family close to Madame Tang fall victim to a gruesome murder. Ambition, desire and lust eventually change Tang's relationships with her own family forever.
For detailed screening information, please visit SIFF website:
Looking for?
https://www.siff.net/festival/looking-for
The Bold, The Corrupt, and The Beautiful
https://www.siff.net/festival/the-bold-the-corrupt-and-the-beautiful
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Press Contacts:
Vicky Shih at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Seattle
Email: shshih@mofa.gov.tw, Tel: 206-441-4586#310
Ashley Sun at the Taiwan Academy in Los Angeles
Email: slc@taipei.org, Tel:626-653-8090
