American film director Alison Klayman’s documentary “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry" has finally made it to Taipei.

How the film -- about the artist and Chinese activist who has been openly critical of the Chinese government -- came to be is an interesting tale of serendipity.

Klayman grew up in the Philadelphia area and graduated in 2006 from Brown University, where she majored in history and wrote her senior thesis about ''slavery and servitude in 18th-century Rhode Island.'' Six years later, she's the director of a well-received documentary about Chinese artist and social provocateur Ai.

I spoke with Klayman about how the movie came to be, how she initially met Mr. Ai and what the movie is about.

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Ang Lee may carry an American passport, but Taiwan is always in his heart.

The Hollywood helmer was born in southern Taiwan, the son of a school principal, and now in his mid-50s he has come back to his roots in the southern part of the island nation to open up a new filmmaking studio with roots in Los Angeles.

The new high-end production facility is being jointly run with U.S. visual effects producer Rhythm & Hues Studios and the R&H Visual Effects Center in Taiwan plans to employ 200 Taiwanese digital film artists who will be trained by R&H experts. This is Lee's gift back to his native land, and he acted as the go-between for the Hollywood studio and local government officials in the port city of Kaohsiung.

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Peter Starr, called the "Spielberg of motorcycle moviemaking" by his friend Jay Leno, is building a unique sort of bridge to Taiwan. 

Starr made 40 motorcycle racing movies for the 1970s to the 1990s. Now 69, Starr visited the Pacific island nation last year with a plan to make a documentary about a group of elderly motor scooter riders,

But Starr learned that a 31-year-old Taiwanese director, Hua Tian-lao, had already made his own documentary about the cross-country scooter brigade of octogenarians hitting the road in Taiwan, so he decided to cancel plans for his own movie. .The ''Grand Riders," as they are called in English, are the focus of a 90-minute documentary titled "Go Grand Riders." The film was released earlier this year.

"When I found out director Hua was already well into producing his movie on the same...

While news about the Middle East is regular fare in North America and Europe, most Asian countries shy away from reporting about Israel or Palestine, except for short news segments about war and uprisings. So when a local TV network in Taiwan, ETTV, sent a reporter and a camera crew to Israel in June to shoot a documentary-style travelogue, it was news in and of itself.

And when Taiwanese reporter and producer Claire Su arrived in Israel, she had no idea what to expect from her first visit to the Holy Land. She returned to Taipei with fond memories of the people she met there and an hourlong news program that recently aired on national TV in her home country.

I caught the show when it aired the other day in the States. I was channel-surfing on a Sunday afternoon, when I switched over to ETTV, a 24-hour Chinese-language news channel, and saw images of Israel...