Following the two-week marketing campaign for The Wayward Cloud (
Apart from the box office sales, Tsai is receiving other cash rewards. Last Thursday before the film's premiere, Kaohsiung City presented Tsai with NT$10 million because most of the film's scenes were shot in Kaohsiung.
Kaohsiung City set up the prize during Frank Hsieh's (
PHOTO COURTESY OF URBAN NOMAD
But the film's controversial content has led some Kaohsiung city citizens to begin questioning the policy. Last weekend at one Kaohsiung screening, a movie-goer walked out of the theater with angry sentiments: "Is it right to use us taxpayer's money to give to a film like this?"
This weekend, two mini film festivals will showcase more than 60 non-mainstream films.
Canadian Spring is a showcase of new and classic films from Canada (
PHOTO COURTESY OF SPOT
The Urban Nomad Film Fest (城市游牧影展), a showcase of independent shorts and animations will take place from tonight until Sunday night at Treasure Hill (寶藏巖), a community in south Taipei that has been revamped to be an open-air public space for contemporary arts events.
Two feature-length dramas by renowned director Denys Arcand will be the main focus at the Canadian Spring showcase. These include The Barbarian Invasion, which won the 2004 Oscar for best foreign language film, and the 1986 work The Decline of American Empire, which brought Arcand international fame.
Barbarian is a tragicomedy which has intense drama and vivid illustrations to tell the story of a free-spirited liberal professor facing the last days of his life and then looks at the different reactions and treatments from his friends and family.
PHOTO COURTESY OF URBAN NOMAD
Decline is an intriguing drama about four men and four women talking about sex, the female body and love affairs at one dinner party.
Besides the two dramas from Arcand, the opening film of Canadian Spring is worth checking out for its highly controversial topic. Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat scratches its way beneath the surface of an infamous Toronto animal cruelty case and deftly explores the opaque logic surrounding this macabre act, according to the Spot and e.bell Web sites.
Jesse Power, ex-vegetarian, was an art student when he conceived the act that inspired the film. In May 2001, he enlisted two friends, Anthony Wennekers and Matthew Kaczorowski, to help him kill a cat. The intention was to make a video that protested the unthinking consumption of factory-slaughtered animals by killing, cooking and eating a cherished domestic pet -- a feline posthumously named "Kensington" by animal-rights activists. Alerted by an outraged roommate, the police found the skinned and decapitated cat in the beer fridge. Kaczorowski fled and was apprehended in Vancouver two years later. All three eventually pleaded guilty to animal cruelty and mischief charges.
Coming into its fourth year, the Urban Nomad Film Festival presents a larger showcase this time with 50 short films. The event was organized by two expat journalists David Frazier and Sean Scanlan, and it looks to become a rare-find film festival in Taipei that preserves an underground spirit and a sense of raw creativity.
The independent films selected in the showcase are a mixture from four sources: US underground film scenes, Taiwanese film schools, overseas Taiwanese filmmakers and films made by expats in Taiwan. Genres include narrative, CG animation, experimental, surf videos, comedy, absurdity, documentary.
Nineteen-seventy-four is a 23-minute film that gives an amazing look at the seduction between a Taiwanese girl student and her English teacher. TC Lin (
There are also two documentaries that record ongoing international tragedies. The film Boom documents the civil war in Liberia and shows the heavy mortar shells and innocent people murdered. Those Left Behind looks at relief work in Sri Lanka one month after the devastating tsunami, as well as the political turmoil of the island nation.
There is also a CG animation about an innocent blow-up doll who gets abused by her new owner, titled Innocent Life.
The location of Urban Nomad also highlights an underground creativity. Finnish architect/designer Marco Cassagrande will help build an outdoor theater by the river by using bamboo and plastic sheets to make a tunnel above a short bridge. The audience will view the films sitting on the bridge. There will also be cases of Heineken provided.
For more program information check out the Urban Nomad blogsite, http://urbannomadfilmfest.blogspot.com.
In the mainstream view, the Philippines should be worried that a conflict over Taiwan between the superpowers will drag in Manila. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr observed in an interview in The Wall Street Journal last year, “I learned an African saying: When elephants fight, the only one that loses is the grass. We are the grass in this situation. We don’t want to get trampled.” Such sentiments are widespread. Few seem to have imagined the opposite: that a gray zone incursion of People’s Republic of China (PRC) ships into the Philippines’ waters could trigger a conflict that drags in Taiwan. Fewer
March 18 to March 24 Yasushi Noro knew that it was not the right time to scale Hehuan Mountain (合歡). It was March 1913 and the weather was still bitingly cold at high altitudes. But he knew he couldn’t afford to wait, either. Launched in 1910, the Japanese colonial government’s “five year plan to govern the savages” was going well. After numerous bloody battles, they had subdued almost all of the indigenous peoples in northeastern Taiwan, save for the Truku who held strong to their territory around the Liwu River (立霧溪) and Mugua River (木瓜溪) basins in today’s Hualien County (花蓮). The Japanese
Pei-Ru Ko (柯沛如) says her Taipei upbringing was a little different from her peers. “We lived near the National Palace Museum [north of Taipei] and our neighbors had rice paddies. They were growing food right next to us. There was a mountain and a river so people would say, ‘you live in the mountains,’ and my friends wouldn’t want to come and visit.” While her school friends remained a bus ride away, Ko’s semi-rural upbringing schooled her in other things, including where food comes from. “Most people living in Taipei wouldn’t have a neighbor that was growing food,” she says. “So
Whether you’re interested in the history of ceramics, the production process itself, creating your own pottery, shopping for ceramic vessels, or simply admiring beautiful handmade items, the Zhunan Snake Kiln (竹南蛇窯) in Jhunan Township (竹南), Miaoli County, is definitely worth a visit. For centuries, kiln products were an integral part of daily life in Taiwan: bricks for walls, tiles for roofs, pottery for the kitchen, jugs for fermenting alcoholic drinks, as well as decorative elements on temples, all came from kilns, and Miaoli was a major hub for the production of these items. The Zhunan Snake Kiln has a large area dedicated