So, you still think Tsai Ming-liang's (
Last week in Kaohsiung during the last few takes of shooting, Tsai's favorite actor Lee Kang-sheng (
Chen Shiang-chyi (
PHOTOS: SHEN CHAO-LIANG, TAIPEI TIMES
As for actress Lu Yi-ching (
"This is going to be a lively and bustling movie and I think it will be a breakthrough for myself in terms of a film style," Tsai said.
He is a fanatic fan of 1930s Mandarin pop songs from artists like Grace Ge (
The story of Wayward Wind, which has just finished shooting, is an extension of Tsai's 2001 feature What Time is it There? (
Chen Shiang-chyi's character meets watch vendor Lee Kang-sheng's character on a skywalk in Taipei before she leaves for Paris. A strange longing grows between the two when she is away. But when Chen returns to Taipei, the skywalk is gone and she does not know how to find Lee, who has lost his job as a vendor and has become a porn actor.
The narrative is not chronological, Tsai said. "It will not be a realistic film in terms of space and time ... In terms of acting, I also give the actors more latitude, this time."
For the actors, nudity was an issue, though Lee said, "I don't need to watch more porn films to find out more [about the life of porn stars]. I've already seen a lot of them."
Like Tsai's previous films, Wayward Wind is partly funded by investors in France. The NT$18 million budget movie is co-financed by French TV station Arte and Centre National de la Cinematographie, in cooperation with Taiwan's Subsidy For Film Production (
So, will this new film have more dialogue than Tsai's last movie, Goodbye, Dragon Inn (
In the next few months tough decisions will need to be made by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and their pan-blue allies in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). It will reveal just how real their alliance is with actual power at stake. Party founder Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) faced these tough questions, which we explored in part one of this series, “Ko Wen-je, the KMT’s prickly ally,” (Aug. 16, page 12). Ko was open to cooperation, but on his terms. He openly fretted about being “swallowed up” by the KMT, and was keenly aware of the experience of the People’s First Party
Aug. 25 to Aug. 31 Although Mr. Lin (林) had been married to his Japanese wife for a decade, their union was never legally recognized — and even their daughter was officially deemed illegitimate. During the first half of Japanese rule in Taiwan, only marriages between Japanese men and Taiwanese women were valid, unless the Taiwanese husband formally joined a Japanese household. In 1920, Lin took his frustrations directly to the Ministry of Home Affairs: “Since Japan took possession of Taiwan, we have obeyed the government’s directives and committed ourselves to breaking old Qing-era customs. Yet ... our marriages remain unrecognized,
Not long into Mistress Dispeller, a quietly jaw-dropping new documentary from director Elizabeth Lo, the film’s eponymous character lays out her thesis for ridding marriages of troublesome extra lovers. “When someone becomes a mistress,” she says, “it’s because they feel they don’t deserve complete love. She’s the one who needs our help the most.” Wang Zhenxi, a mistress dispeller based in north-central China’s Henan province, is one of a growing number of self-styled professionals who earn a living by intervening in people’s marriages — to “dispel” them of intruders. “I was looking for a love story set in China,” says Lo,
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
RSS