The Boat-Burning Festival poster

The Boat-Burning Festival

1979 · 20 min

Documentary

not streaming

Shot by Chang Chao-Tang and cinematographer Christopher Doyle, The Boat Burning Festival captures the ceremony worshipping Wangye（王爺）, the local god of plague, held every three years in Sucuo Village（蘇厝） in Tainan（台南）, Taiwan. Chang timed the work to "Ommadawn", a Celtic-inspired progressive rock album by Mike Oldfield. Defying genre conventions and deviating stylistically from television or ethnographic documentary, the film testifies to the tense and complex coexistence of traditional rites, local folklore, and discourses about modernisation and identity in 1970s Taiwan.

Crew

  • Director Chang Chao-Tang

Crew

External reads

No articles linked yet.

🔥 Hot takes

warming up the wall…

Intermission

GO DEEPER

Turn the obscurity dial up. There's a lot further down to go.

Deal me more →

Metadata & streaming data: TMDB (JustWatch). This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.