Now in its 11th year, the Vancouver Taiwanese Film Festival returns to the Vancity Theatre from Friday to Sunday (June 9 to 11) with another smartly curated batch of films. Here are three titles that strive to colour outside the lines a little.

Ode to Time

Some 40 years ago, a restless generation turned to western-inspired folk music as a means of asserting itself after decades of martial law. This document of a 2015 stadium concert in Taipei will hit some heavy nostalgia buttons for anyone who was there. For the rest of us, the appeal lies in a history lesson not short on drama, and the discovery of musicians like Ara Kimbo Hu, seen here as a white-haired old man performing the incomparably moving Puyuma song “The Beautiful Rice Fields”. Hu retired from music in 1984 and devoted himself to the Taiwanese Aboriginal Movement. These are artists clearly untroubled by any notions of commerce, and even their music was secondary to the task of accessing and actualizing a nation’s soul.
June 9 (6 p.m.), followed by a Q&A; June 11 (2:30 p.m.), followed by a musical performance by Jaga

Formosa Betrayed

Kudos to the VTFF for reviving this 2009 American film, which overcomes its boxy plotting to emerge as an unusually tuned-in political thriller. It’s the early ’80s, and FBI agent Jake Kelly (James Van Der Beek) is sent to Taipei to help investigate the murder of a Taiwanese university prof in the U.S. While a State Department lackey played by Wendy Crewson tries to steer him away from trouble—not to mention the illegal protests he keeps bumping into—Kelly gradually finds himself inside a more dangerous game than he imagined. While the extreme tensions that preceded Taiwanese democratization are overtly woven into its plot, Formosa Betrayed takes a bold view of coordinated covert action by reactionary forces on a global scale, largely directed by Uncle You-Know-Who. For the disillusioned G-man, betrayal in this case isn’t confined only to Formosa.
June 10 (12:30 p.m.), followed by a panel discussion with filmmaker Adam Kane

The Tag-Along

While it leaves no modern horror cliché unturned—from an overreliance on CGI to off-the-shelf sound effects—The Tag-Along does introduce us to an uncommonly creepy Taiwanese urban legend in the shape of a mosien. Rumours of the existence of this pint-sized ghost spread after the appearance of an unsettling home video in the ’90s purporting to show a spectral child following uninvited behind a group of mountain hikers. Director Cheng Wei-hao uses that footage and spins enough of a yarn from it to justify a late-night viewing, while headliner Hsu Wei-ning survives some highly suspect character motivation (why doesn’t she want to get married and have a kid, anyway?) to steal the picture.
June 10 (9 p.m.)