Midi Z

Born 1982 in Lashio, Myanmar
Based in Taiwan: Taipei, Kaohsiung. China: Yunnan, Shanghai, Beijing. Thailand: Bangkok, Chiang Rai, Chiang Mai. Myanmar: Lashio, Shan State

Moved to Taiwan at the age of 16 and studied filmmaking at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. An emerging young film director who attracted attention after his first feature film, Return to Burma, was screened at the Busan International Film Festival and the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and whose third feature, Ice Poison (2014), was selected as the Taiwanese entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy Awards®. Midi Z, who was born and raised in Myanmar since his parents moved there from China, depicts in his films such topics as the drug problems that plague his home country of Myanmar and the people who live there, and the sadness and poverty of ethnic Chinese living in faraway Myanmar in a style with multiple possibilities that crosses national borders.

In Palace on the Sea, the spirit of a woman in a Myanmar traditional dress who was a migrant laborer roams a seaside town in Taiwan in search of her homeland. It depicts with a fantastical touch and in a multilayered fashion the issue of “returning home,” addressing both the reality of the difficulties migrant laborers face in returning to their home countries from Taiwan and the significance of returning home for the devoutly Buddhist people of Myanmar.