Inspired by avant-garde artists from the West, especially surrealists like André Breton and Jean Cocteau, seven men founded a poets’ collective in 1933 in Taiwan, which had then already been occupied by Japan for 40 years.
The name ‘Le Moulin’, also the title of a literary magazine that appeared just four times, not only refers to the French affiliation, but also to the fresh wind that the group wanted to blow through the poetry landscape of Taiwan. The seven of them primarily faced a lack of comprehension, however, and ‘Le Moulin’ was a failure.
With a mixture of old film clips, reenacted scenes, literary passages, spoken lines of poetry and traditional songs, the young director Huang Ya-li brings the progressive poets back to life after they had been forgotten for decades in a film essay that is lyrical, uncompromising and unique in its form.
Film details
- Country of production
- Taiwan
- Year
- 2015
- Festival edition
- IFFR 2016
- Length
- 162'
- Medium/Format
- DCP
