Huang Hsin-Yao

Born and raised in Tainan City, Taiwan, Huang Hsin-Yao moved around from district to district with his family "more than twenty times since [he] was a child" before he was thirty.[2] Since junior high, Huang has worked part-time in factories and for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), putting up posters and distributing flyers to support his family. The life of Martial Law and subsequent burgeoning political activities inspired him to pay attention to social issues. Later, he studied at the evening school of Chinese Culture University College of Journalism & Communication in Taipei and became active in social movements.[3]

Huang’s interest in documentaries was kindled by the mantra of the South Digital Newsletter (Chinese: 南方電子報): "Make our own media, sing our own song (Chinese: 作自己的媒體，唱自己的歌)."He first applied for the documentary training program organized by Fullshot Film Studio (Chinese: 全景映像工作室, now named 財團法人全景傳播基金會).[4] He then went on to study at the Graduate Institute of Documentary & Film Archiving at TNNUA and got an MFA degree.

Yantian Cin Zih (Chinese: 鹽田欽仔) marked Huang Hsin-Yao’s first attempt as a documentary director. Shot in Yantian, Tainan City, the film follows a man who waits for compensation for the relocation and demolition of his village. It was first filmed when Huang was in the documentary training program at Fullshot Film Studio in 1998. It also motivated him to make Seaman (Chinese: 添仔的海) for his first-year assignment at graduate school later on.[5]

During his study at TNNUA, Huang made Dog with Man (Chinese: 多格威斯麵) in 2002 about the controversial personality Ke Sìh Hǎ (Chinese: 柯賜海), who was known to stand behind politicians interviewed by news broadcasting channel with written protesting message to gain free TV coverage. For his MFA degree production, Huang made Bluffing (Chinese: 唬爛三小) in 2005, a documentary about four of his high school best friends as a social section of his generation, which received many awards, including the Golden Harvest Awards for Best Documentary.[5]

After Bluffing Huang’s documentaries begin to focus on the relationship between humanity and the environment, including Nimbus (Chinese: 帶水雲) , Taivalu (Chinese: 沈ㄕㄣˇㄇㄟˊ沒之島), and Ali-88 (Chinese: 阿里八八).[6]

In 2014, Huang made his first fictional short film, Da Fo (Chinese: 大佛) about a murder committed by the boss of a buddha statue factory witnessed by his security guard and his friend, who collects recyclables for a living. The film attracted director Chung Mong-Hong’s (Chinese: 鍾孟宏) attention at the 51st Golden Horse Award, who encouraged Huang to develop it into a feature film he helped produced, The Great Buddha + (Chinese: 大佛普拉斯).[7] The feature film expands the original plot to tell a story reflecting the social discrepancy in rural Taiwan that is surrealistically realistic. The film is stylistically creative by playing with color and narrator’s voiceover. Huang was awarded Best New Director at Golden Horse Award for this film in 2017.[8]

Huang continued to make documentaries after his successful fictional film debut. In 2015, he made Cloud Nation (Chinese: 雲之國), in which he intentionally suppresses his own presence and abandons narrator’s voiceover, for which his films were known. With no dialogue or human subject in the entire film, the film leaves the audience to determine what is documented and for what.[9]

In 2020, Huang drew inspiration from his documentary Bluffing to make another feature film, Classmates Minus (Chinese: 同學麥娜絲) also produced by Chung Mong-Hong.[10] The film weaves the lives of four high school classmates after they graduated from high school to provide a glimpse of the ambitions and frustrations of Taiwan’s contemporary males in their late thirties as well as their changed friendship.[11] Huang’s colorful voiceover once again plays an active role in the film not only as a narrator but also as an invisible character. Despite the many nominations in the 57th Golden Horse Awards and 23rd Taipei Film Festival, the film only won the Best Production Design Award from both, and Best Supporting Actor (Nadow Lin) from the Golden Horse Awards.