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Peripheral Futures Screening: Returning Souls

  • Termin in der Vergangenheit
  • Mittwoch, 22. April 2026, 20:00 - 22:00 Uhr
  • Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies, Seminargebäude, CATS Auditorium (R. 010.01.05), Voßstraße 2, 69115 Heidelberg

    A famous ancestral house of the matrilineal Ami tribe in Taiwan, contained carved pillars able to convey legendary stories: those of a great flood, a glowing girl, a descending shaman sent by the Mother Sun, a headhunting event that turned out to be lethal to some of the tribe’s fathers… and more. Some decades ago, a typhoon topples the house, and the powerful pillars are moved to the Institute of Ethnology Museum at Academia Sinica. Should they stay there? A group of young villagers, assisted by some of the tribe’s female shamans, decide to communicate with the ancestors resident in the pillars. Bringing the ancestral souls rather than the pillars back to the village, they begin to reconstruct the old ancestral house. In an environment informed by diverse religious (including Christian) beliefs and torn between national land policies and local politics, the young people encounter many difficulties and frustrations in trying to make their dreams of cultural revitalization—bringing back not only the ancestral souls but also the soul of the village—come true. This documentary directed by HU Tai-Li, in considering this unique case of repatriation and its implications, allows the audience to rethink aboriginal futures.

    About HU Tai-Li

    HU Tai-Li was a pioneer of ethnographic film in Taiwan. For many years, he was a research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taiwan and professor at Taiwan’s National Tsinghua University, as well as president of the Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival. After graduating from the History Department of the National Taiwan University, she entered the City University of New York, and obtained her Ph.D. degree in anthropology. Her films have won the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival “Best Documentary Film Award”, the Chicago International Film Festival “Silver Plaque Award” the Houston International Film Festival “Gold Special Jury Award”, and Taiwan International Documentary Festival Jury’s “Special Mention Award”. Composer CHEN Shih-Hui worked closely with HU Tai-Li for many years before her untimely death. She will speak about this stimulating cooperation and answer questions about the documentary after the screening.

    Alle Termine der Veranstaltung 'Peripheral Futures – Reading History from the “Margins”'

    Where is future created? Based on some of the research done in the Thematic Research Network “Denk(t)räume–(Re)thinking and Building Futures” and at CAPAS, the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at Heidelberg University, this event series takes the question of building futures from the margins as its starting point for a review of some of the seminal literature in global history. The aim is to foreground marginalized sources (material peripheries, e.g., the “un-disciplined" knowledge produced by the arts), positions (socio-political pheripheries, e.g., that of indigenous protesters), and regions of the world (spatial peripheries, e.g., parts of the world that do not make headline news) as well as specific times (chronological pheripheries: questioning why there may be a privileging of specific periods in time while neglecting others). 

    In taking what is read as “marginal”, its voices and sources seriously, and by including artistic and activist resources, this series offers an intervention to established academic reasoning: at a time when apocalyptic narratives and authoritarian visions of the future dominate public discourse, the events focus on different forms of “critical hope” that can emerge in times of crisis: analytically grounded, socially engaged, and convinced that a diverse, collectively shaped future arises from the productive tension between different worldviews, the event series sets out to test out transcultural perspectives on and alternative approaches to the writing of histories (of and for the future).

    English