Especially moving was the South Korean film Pink Palace. This movie showed interviews with all types of handicapped men and women, including visually and aurally impaired and cerebral palsy patients, talking openly about difficulties in their sex life, or about how they long for, but have never had sexual encounters.
The festival also featured some excellent Taiwanese filmmakers. Through the story of two Chinese former prostitutes who came to Taiwan to work, only to end up walking the streets in Wanhua, viewers gained a better understanding of issues related to the movements for sex workers' rights. As a result, we also gain perspective on ourselves and our potentially narrow-minded or unwittingly discriminating attitudes and values.
In my opinion, COSWAS, like the TIWA and the students' movement for the Lo Sheng Sanatorium, is an organization of which the Taiwanese should be proud. These groups do their best for the human rights of marginalized members of society and help Taiwan maintain a certain ethical standard so that the country doesn't look completely backward and barbaric when compared to the international community.
But Taiwan has a government that doesn't have its priorities right, with pan-blue and pan-green political parties who are only trying to steal votes from one another with empty issues like referendums on either entering or returning to the UN. They don't understand, and don't care about, these smaller efforts and ideas that could make Taiwan a better place.
If our government only sees or serves the middle class and disregards the human rights of people considered to be lower down the social strata, then even if Taiwan were recognized as a sovereign state, it would still be less than a nation.
No matter if it calls itself Taiwan or the Republic of China, what has it contributed to the world that its people can be proud of except things like being home to the factory that emits the highest amount of carbon dioxide in the world, the trampling of human rights and discrimination against the weak? Even if it is independent, of what use is such a country to the world?
Kuo Li-hsin is a commentator.
Translated by Anna Stiggelbout
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