The Women Make Waves International Film Festival is one of Taiwan’s largest and most established organizations to promote gender awareness and engage with gender issues, education, theory, and activism. This year the festival is celebrating 30 years of screening, curation, discussion, and creativity centered around issues of gender, not only showcasing films by women from around the world, but also illuminating the writing of gendered social histories through film in Taiwan. Since 2019, Powered Image Working Lab has brought tours of the festival to Hsinchu, covering themes including “Displacements and Intersectionality,” “Blazing Histories: Movements Transformed,” and “The Revolution Continues.” Screenings, lectures, and discussions have enabled multi-faceted conversations exploring these topics across a variety of films, bringing together not only scholars and students across NYCU campuses, but also those involved in education and curation across Hsinchu.

This year’s NYCU tour runs from October 31st through November 24th, 2023, and includes a total of five screenings and 12 films across both Kuang-Fu campus and Hsinchu’s Jiang Shan Yi Gai Suo Cafe. Titled “關照練習Times of Mutual Action, Times of Care,” this tour features films from the Women Make Waves main festival categories of “Our Queer City,” “Reaching the Impossible,” “Everything Melts into One,” “Inner Landscape: The Art of Seeing, Singing, Making and Rebelling,” “Taiwan Competition,” and “Inventing the Time: 30th Anniversary Special Presentation.” From these categories, the selected films revolve around themes of family, childhood, life, affect, creativity, and the gendered structures and struggles within these. Reflecting on histories of sexual harassment and violence, this tour aims to bring attention to the interrelation of care and action: actions of social and political significance resonating and coalescing into forms of mutual care; individual gestures of self care, interpersonal care, and collective care developing into broader social movements and action. In these diverse visions of care and action, and in the communities created through sharing these films, the temporalities of everyday practices and unfolding social movements become connected by the fundamental struggles of care for the self, and care for others.