REFUGEE WEEK TAIWAN 2023 2023 台灣難民週2023 REFUGEE WEEK TAIWAN

Respect oneself and others
Compassion The Moments in Our Live

June 18 – June 22

There is an ethnic group in the world with a population equivalent to 3.5 Taiwans.
The composition is young, about 40% are under 18 years old
There is no unified nationality, race, or language.
The only thing they have in common is that they are both forced to stay away from their
hometown.

In the world, there is a category of people, that triples the entire Taiwanese population, that is without a common nationality, race, or language. The only thing they have in common is that they have been forced to leave their hometowns. With 40% of them being under 18.

Refugee Week is the world’s largest arts and culture festival, celebrating the contributions, resilience, and creativity of refugees and people seeking sanctuary. Refugee Week Taiwan joined this worldwide celebration in 2021 with the aim of raising awareness of global displacement in Taiwan.

The theme for this year’s activities is “Compassion: The Moments in Our Lives”. Compassion is not sympathy but the ability to embrace differences and recognise challenges facing other members of society.

Connection is important for nurturing compassion. The more we see, hear, and interact with asylum seekers, the less we ignore, stereotype, and distance ourselves from them. Therefore, in 2023, we selected three films featuring the experiences of people seeking asylum in a foreign land — the fearful, hopeful, and potentially life-changing moments.

The theme of Taiwan Refugee Week 2023 is “Compassion”, which is not sympathy but the ability to accept differences and recognize the challenges faced by other members of society. For us, “connection” is essential for developing compassion. The more we see, hear, meet, interact with, and understand people who are forcibly displaced, the less they are ignored, stereotyped, and alienated.

Therefore, in the prelude to this year’s Taiwan Refugee Week, the two hosts, Hsiao-Chi Chu and Chunyuan Hu will share their field experiences and have a discussion about what compassion is and how to be compassionate.

June 20 is World Refugee Day, established by UNHCR in 1951. It hopes the international community will pay attention to refugee issues throughout the day. Decades have passed since the Khmer Rouge, but the traumatic memories of that time remain in the land of Cambodia and are inscribed in people’s hearts. For the refugees then, their hometown was so close and far away that they seemed within reach; however, they couldn’t touch them. So even if the war ended and they returned home, everything was changed.

On June 20 this year, 2023 Refugee Week Taiwan invites the two founders of Phare Ponleu Selpak Association (PPSA), Cambodia – TOR Vutha and KHOUN Det, to share their refugee life experience during that time, how they started from the Site 2 refugee camp to establish PPSA, and how art can be the approach to heal traumatic issues.

The first session of the event will start with the documentary Shadow and light | Phare (Patrimoine humain et artistique des réfugiés et de leurs enfants) (https://associationphare.wordpress.com/) directed by French art therapist Veronique Decrop. The film tells the story of the Site 2 refugee camp (the largest refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border after the fall of the Khmer Rouge in the 1980s), where Veronique Decrop was there to help refugees overcome traumatic experiences through painting and art lessons. The second session is shared and QA by the two founders of PPSA – TOR Vutha and KHOUN Det.

On June 22 (Thur.), we are pleased to have Taiwanese director Hsuan Yu Pan, producer Nancy Wolfe, and featured artist Ludmila Christeseva join the screening of the two films My Mother’s Table and The Other Side of the Sea. They will share their filmmaking process and stories. The protagonists in these two films are from Syria and Ukraine, and the films describe their nostalgia for their hometowns and how they advocate anti-war and peace for their motherland. We would love to invite the public to join the discussion about compassion and empathy based on the content of the documentary films, how the filmmaker tells the story of refugees through the lens, and how refugees tell theirs.

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