Review: WEAVING AND SPRING BREEZE, TAIWAN

In an age of displacement, inherited trauma, and cultural fragmentation, two short films –WEAVING and SPRING BREEZE, TAIWAN – directed by Taiwanese American filmmaker Hsuan Yu Pan, offer deeply resonant reflections on how art can restore identity, rebuild community, and help us remember who we are.

WEAVING, a luminous short documentary set in Sweden, follows Belarusian-Swedish visual artist Ludmila Christeseva as she gathers a group of Ukrainian refugee women around the ancient ritual of textile-making. Together, they take up thread and cloth not merely to pass time, but to stitch meaning back into their lives – lives unraveled by war and dislocation. Under Christeseva’s quiet but intentional guidance, the women reclaim agency through the rhythm of weaving, transforming grief into shared purpose. The loom becomes not just a tool but a metaphor: a space where memory and presence, loss and renewal, self and solidarity are woven together.

The film is understated in tone yet profound in implication. It reminds us that healing does not always come through words. Sometimes, it arrives through touch: through the tactile, meditative act of making something whole from fragments. Christeseva’s project offers more than artistic therapy; it is an act of cultural survival and feminine resilience, where community is not inherited but crafted, one thread at a time.

If WEAVING is a portrait of communal healing, SPRING BREEZE, TAIWAN (currently in post-production) is poised to be a powerful meditation on personal identity and intergenerational trauma. The film centers on Pan’s nephew, a young Taiwanese man living in the United States, who has long carried what he describes as “a quiet confusion” about who he is. Through music and a renewed encounter with Taiwan’s repressed history – specifically the White Terror, a decades-long period of political persecution following the 228 Incident in 1947 – he begins to piece together lost threads of cultural belonging.

Though still a work in progress, SPRING BREEZE already promises to be an evocative blend of personal story and historical reckoning. The film incorporates shadow puppetry by Taiwanese American artist Spica Wobbe, guided by Hsin-Yi Lee, a descendant of a 228 victim. These layered forms of storytelling – oral history, visual performance, archival material, and music – mirror the film’s central question: How do we reclaim what has been buried by silence, time, or fear?

This is not Pan’s first exploration of cultural identity through artistic expression. In her earlier documentary Hear, Eat, Home, she follows Syrian-born clarinetist Kinan Azmeh as he navigates life in New York City, reflecting on exile, community, and the redemptive power of shared creativity. In my review of that film, I wrote:

“Pan dwells not on the fact that Azmeh, an immigrant from Syria, is an internationally celebrated virtuoso. His featured role in this film is as a messenger... Pan has set a canvas that fittingly speaks to the harmony achievable through diversity and artistic expression.”

That same ethos infuses SPRING BREEZE; only this time, the canvas is more intimate, and the stakes are intergenerational. Where Hear, Eat, Home draws energy from a multicultural jam session in Harlem, SPRING BREEZE channels a quieter, more introspective current. But both films are driven by the same core belief: that identity is not fixed or singular, but ever-evolving, and that art is the means by which we shape, express, and rediscover it.

Taken together, WEAVING and SPRING BREEZE, TAIWAN offer complementary meditations on the redemptive power of creation. One is external, collective, and tactile; the other internal, historical, and performative. But both insist that creativity is not merely catharsis; it is a lifeline. A means of survival. A way home.

At a time when so many communities are fractured by conflict, migration, or cultural erasure, these films invite us to listen more deeply, to hold space for untold stories, and to see art not as entertainment alone, but as a vessel for healing and remembrance.

While WEAVING is already a complete and moving portrait of resilience through craft, SPRING BREEZE, TAIWAN is still in post-production. The filmmakers are seeking support and educational partnerships to help bring the finished film to schools, community centers, and cultural organizations. Given its themes -- diaspora, trauma, silence, and rediscovery – it holds the potential to resonate far beyond the Taiwanese or Asian American communities from which it springs.

In the end, both films remind us that home is not always a place on a map. Sometimes, it is an act of making. Of remembering. Of returning – thread by thread, note by note – to ourselves.

Screening Plans
WEAVING aims to premiere in Fall 2025; venue TBA.
SPRING BREEZE, TAIWAN is expected in Spring 2026.

To learn more:
https://www.panvideo.net/
https://substack.com/@hsuanyupanfilms

Photo credits: Ruslan Badykov (WEAVING); Hsuan Yu Pan (SPRING BREEZE, TAIWAN)