Blind Shaft (盲井) toured various international film festivals last year and the debut film of director Li Yang (李楊) won dozen of awards, impressing critics with its broad and powerful themes.
It is different from the work of other so-called fifth-gene-ration filmmakers -- whose works are sometimes criticized for being stereotypical of Chinese filmmakers -- and Li tells the story in an almost documentary style, but with the help of an excellent script to provide a solid plot.
Based on the short novel Shen Mu (神木) by Lao She (老舍), Blind Shaft is a tale of greed and compassion. Two itinerant miners, Song Jinming and Tang Chaoyang risk their lives working under dangerous conditions and develop questionable morals in order to survive.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MATA
The film begins in the dark caves of one of the many illegal Chinese coal mines, where Song and Tang are working with Tang's brother Chaolu, who has just arrived. In the depths of a mineshaft, the two kill Chaolu with a pickax and engineer the collapse of a mine wall to make Chaolu's death look like an accident. Song and Tang then go on to extort money from the mine's management, who are under pressure to cover up the
accident.
After leaving with their hush money, the pair spend their ill-gotten gains on women and song and in time find another potential victim, this time an innocent 16-year-old boy named Yuan Fengming, who has been forced to quit school due to his father's disappearance. Tang agrees to help Yuan find a job at a coal mine, but only under one condition -- he must agree to pretend to be Song's nephew.
The three find another illegal mine where the working conditions are even worse. "Take it or leave it. The only thing that China doesn't have is a shortage of people," the foreman says.
This time, Song and Tang's scheme does not go so well. As the pair befriend Yuan, the boy's simplicity and naivete alters the partners' relationship and there is a surprise ending.
Wang Shuangbao (王雙寶) vividly plays the mean and cold-hearted Tang and Li Yixiang (李易祥) performs admirably in the role of Song, whose conscience is pricked by the goodness of Yuan. As for Wang Baoqiang (王寶強), who plays the role of the young victim, it is such a natural performance that it is hard to believe that he is a first-time actor.
This month the government ordered a one-year block of Xiaohongshu (小紅書) or Rednote, a Chinese social media platform with more than 3 million users in Taiwan. The government pointed to widespread fraud activity on the platform, along with cybersecurity failures. Officials said that they had reached out to the company and asked it to change. However, they received no response. The pro-China parties, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), immediately swung into action, denouncing the ban as an attack on free speech. This “free speech” claim was then echoed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC),
Exceptions to the rule are sometimes revealing. For a brief few years, there was an emerging ideological split between the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that appeared to be pushing the DPP in a direction that would be considered more liberal, and the KMT more conservative. In the previous column, “The KMT-DPP’s bureaucrat-led developmental state” (Dec. 11, page 12), we examined how Taiwan’s democratic system developed, and how both the two main parties largely accepted a similar consensus on how Taiwan should be run domestically and did not split along the left-right lines more familiar in
Many people in Taiwan first learned about universal basic income (UBI) — the idea that the government should provide regular, no-strings-attached payments to each citizen — in 2019. While seeking the Democratic nomination for the 2020 US presidential election, Andrew Yang, a politician of Taiwanese descent, said that, if elected, he’d institute a UBI of US$1,000 per month to “get the economic boot off of people’s throats, allowing them to lift their heads up, breathe, and get excited for the future.” His campaign petered out, but the concept of UBI hasn’t gone away. Throughout the industrialized world, there are fears that
Most heroes are remembered for the battles they fought. Taiwan’s Black Bat Squadron is remembered for flying into Chinese airspace 838 times between 1953 and 1967, and for the 148 men whose sacrifice bought the intelligence that kept Taiwan secure. Two-thirds of the squadron died carrying out missions most people wouldn’t learn about for another 40 years. The squadron lost 15 aircraft and 148 crew members over those 14 years, making it the deadliest unit in Taiwan’s military history by casualty rate. They flew at night, often at low altitudes, straight into some of the most heavily defended airspace in Asia.
RSS