Overt Listening

Kinmen is an archipelago off the coast of Taiwan, just a few kilometers from the Chinese mainland. "Overt Listening" (2026), Tiffany Sia’s first feature-length film, is an essayistic journey through Kinmen’s pristine shores, bunker attractions, military tunnels, and roundabouts featuring statues of Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen—sites maintained by Taiwan’s national park authorities that freeze Kinmen’s Cold War history into a spectacle and a place of commemoration. Eschewing spoken dialogue and drawing on the tradition of silent film, Sia employs intertitles as an intermediary voice—simultaneously historical record, suppressed testimony, and the unspoken narrative of the landscape itself. While the years 1989 to 1991 are generally regarded as a period of Cold War détente, the film identifies an enduring, elusive paradigm. It relies on acoustic phenomena—silence, signals, noise, song—whereby military activity remains audible yet invisible in the distance, and silence is far from peaceful. (C.B.)