Synopsis
Swimming on the Highway is a milestone in Taiwanese independent documentary filmmaking, boasting wins at the Taiwan Film Institute-organised Golden Harvest Awards and the prestigious Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. Documentarian Wu Yao-tung was 26 and in his final year of art school when he made this, his thesis film. Swimming on the Highway explores the tensions and fissures in the relationship between the filmmaker and his schoolmate Tom, a depressive gay man suffering from AIDS. The film is about its own making, charting Wu’s own struggles to finish the project and graduate. In its depiction of the conflict between (what appear to be) a naive art student and a self-aggrandising roué, the result is raw, visceral character study at its best.