A festival within a festival is taking place at Warner Village Cinemas this weekend. Taipei's 1999 International Film Festival is screening Hurricane Festival, a new film from Taiwanese director Chi Y Lee (李
The former Taipei resident, poet and author emigrated to the US in 1987, abandoning a critically-acclaimed trail of writings for a PSYC degree at UCLA. Fate intervened in 1992 when Lee's Mandarin screenplay The Eye Behind The Walls garnered awards and some much-needed cash from sources here in Taipei, allowing him to enter the Pasadena College of Design and pursue his main interest -- making movies. Lee graduated from the PCD in 1996, and through the help of Taiwanese investment went on to direct Hurricane Festival, an American-made, alternative cinema project budgeted at just under US$1 million. Two years later, the film is finally going to be seen by audiences in Lee's native country.
"It's kind of fun for me as a person from Taiwan to come to LA and shoot an American film," says Lee from his home in California, eagerly waxing on his first feature. "And now the film is being brought back to Taiwan to show my people." He hesitates, exploring the significance of the notion, then laughs. "Are they going to like it, or understand it, or appreciate it, relate to it? I cannot say."
Like all art-house films with humble beginnings, Hurricane Festival had the requisite quirky incubation. "In LA, one of my friends who was a street magician got an opportunity to travel in a big bus, to take his act on tour," explains Lee. "At the time, I was still in film school, and he asked me if I would be interested in shooting a documentary about his trip. I thought it was an interesting idea, but for many reasons we didn't get the opportunity to do it. But I thought it was a good storyline. When I was writing my first screenplay The Eye Behind The Walls, I knew I didn't have the money to shoot a huge film, but at that time I wrote another little something about three crazy characters taking a bus on tour. Later, I showed the script to Sue [Huang (黃
For upstart filmmakers, generating money for a film isn't easy, regardless of where you're located. Moving to LA helped Lee kick-start his career, but like most directors he still maintains an eye on his home market.
"Right now it's more and more difficult shooting in Taiwan, in terms of finding money," says Lee. Taiwan has already spawned successful directors and films (Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman is perhaps the best internationally-known example), but he thinks the insatiable local appetite for Hollywood fare is stifling a proper alternative film scene in Taiwan. "It's difficult, because my first screenplay was viewed by some people as too artsy, too hard to sell in Taipei."
Hurricane Festival tells the story of Nick, an addled street magician and hustler who takes his routine on the road, travelling from LA to Atlantic City in a psychedelic bus. Nick carries a lot of baggage on his trip, including a feisty street urchin, a retarded stooge, and a murder on his conscience. Mila the urchin dreams of being a pin-up girl in New York. The retarded Pet Boy is only interested in following Nick, the sole person to show him care and attention. Their journey takes them to the bottom of the corny vaudeville sideshow that is their lives. It is a journey marked by misunderstandings, fights, clashing instincts and egos, as this miniature travelling circus of personalities gambles its way to a fated demise.
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