🎬 9th Taiwan Film Festival Berlin
FOLKTALE｜The Story We Invent to Survive
📅 Festival
24.09–04.10.2026
Berlin
🎞 30 films
🎤 Filmmaker Q&As & conversations
🎓 Director masterclass
🎭 Live performances
🎬 Silent Film × Benshi
✨ Interdisciplinary programmes
Description:
The 9th Taiwan Film Festival Berlin takes FOLKTALE｜The Story We Invent to Survive as its theme.
Here, folktales are not simply ancient myths or stories inherited from the past. They are stories people create when reality cannot contain everything they have experienced: memories that remain unresolved, histories that resist a single interpretation, family stories that are difficult to speak about, rumours that continue to circulate, and identities shaped across generations and places.
Folktales are never finished. They change with every telling, as each generation leaves something behind, adds something new, or reshapes a story in order to understand the present.
Through cinema, performance, conversation, and interdisciplinary programmes, TFFB 2026 looks at storytelling as something alive: a way of remembering, questioning, imagining, and sometimes surviving.
Across the festival, stories move between Taiwan and Southeast Asia, between personal memory and collective history, between documentary and fiction, and between what can be spoken and what remains unsettled.
This year's programme brings together 30 films, live performances, special screenings, filmmaker conversations, and interdisciplinary events.
🎞 Opening Film
The Waves Will Carry Us 人生海海
LAU Kek-Huat｜2025
Our Opening Film follows Ah-Yao as he returns to Malaysia for his father's funeral, only to discover a secret that sends his family on an unexpected journey.
The film opens the festival's exploration of migration, family memory, belonging, and the stories that continue to shape us across generations.
✨ German Premiere
✨ Q&A with director LAU Kek-Huat
Alongside the opening film, the festival programme includes works by Taiwanese and international filmmakers, director talks and masterclasses, a Silent Film × Benshi programme, live performance, and special interdisciplinary projects including The House of Onomatopoeia – Berlin.
The festival concludes with Mother Bhumi, bringing this year's journey through memory, mythology, identity, and collective storytelling to a close.
For eleven days, we invite audiences in Berlin to encounter stories that are not necessarily complete, resolved, or easily explained.
Because sometimes, when reality is not enough, we begin to tell stories.
Credit:
Presented by Taiwan Film Festival Berlin / Impression Taiwan e.V.
