East Asia Film Festival Ireland presents the award-winning debut feature, Far Away Eyes, by director Wang Chun-Hong, preceded by Martin Healy’s short film, A Moment Twice Lived, selected in partnership with aemi.

Film Information
Martin Healy, A Moment Twice Lived, 2016, IRE, DCP, 12 mins
Wang Chun-Hong, Far Away Eyes, 2022, CHN, DCP, Subtitled, 79 mins
Running Time: 91 mins

In Far Away Eyes, writer-director Wang Chun-Hong, a photographer born in Taiwan, plays the young male protagonist in his debut feature set in Taipei at a crucial period of history: the Taiwan presidential election in January 2020. Nearly thirty, the film’s protagonist reflects on his past, present, and possible future. Inspired to imagine his film – about a young man trapped by the unknown – on seeing a photograph of a group of people watching two planes in the sky, and merging documentary and auto-fiction, he forges his own cinematic visual style, a blended language of image overlays, mirror-images, panning, and long takes.

Wang Chun-Hong’s film is preceded by Martin Healy’s A Moment Twice Lived which was selected by aemi in partnership with EAFFI. Healy’s film explores our perception of the passage of time through the subjective experience of memory, ageing and dreaming. The work makes reference to JW Dunne’s theoretical book ‘An experiment with time’ (1927), which described a series of precognitive dreams, in which he experienced multiple dimensions of time. In the film, Dunne’s theories are reflected in the formal structure of the narrative and an analogy is created between the artifice of filmmaking and the experience of time repeated. The circuitous narrative focuses on a fleeting moment when a lone character studies the surface of a painting and begins to sense she has seen the image before. As the character becomes absorbed in the painting’s composition, she begins to experience dual realities and the composition becomes visualised as a parallel film shoot in which she performs the lead role. The narrative moves between the two interconnected scenes and the distinction between past, present and future becomes increasingly blurred, creating an impression of time.

This programme is taking place as part of the East Asia Film Festival Ireland (EAFFI) 2023 and will be introduced by artist Martin Healy.

Biography, Wang Chun-Hong
WANG Chun-Hong was born in Taiwan in 1990 and graduated from Shih Hsin University, Film and TV Department, in 2017. His first film, FAREWELL PHOTOGRAPHY (2015), shot in 16mm, was selected for Taipei Film Festival. His second short film, DOUBLE REFLECTION (2017), was part of the official selection for the 2018 Marseille and was nominated as Best Short Film at Taipei Film Festival. FAR AWAY EYES (2020), his first feature film project, was awarded the MicroClimate Prize at the FidLAB 2019 and was selected in the WIP section of Golden Horse Promotion Platform where it won the TAICCA Creative Award.