That summer, on a lazy, sultry day, an aimless Chiu road his motorcycle to the Central Mountain Range, where he eventually found himself in Wushe, a mountain township that is home to the Seediq people.
Chiu returned there many times, staying in Wushe on and off for six years, during which he found himself a Seediq girlfriend — now his wife — was given the Seediq name Bawan by the tribe’s elders, and finished his Wushe Incident comic book, considered Taiwan’s first historical investigative manga.
The deeper he dug into the history of the Seediq, the more urgently Chiu felt the need to preserve their culture. This sense of urgency prompted him to take up a camera and recording equipment and begin documenting Seediq culture, language and oral history, which led to the creation in 1993 of a two-hour documentary on the Wushe Incident that attracted the attention of critics at various film festivals around the world.
“The Seediq’s fading culture was being further lost on a daily basis, with research possibilities being reduced even more every time another tribal elder died,” Chiu said.
Chiu said the film will also serve as a witness to the Seediq people’s social rules, core values and tribal beliefs.
“All the so-called historical truths consist of differing accounts recorded by differing people from differing angles, which does not necessarily make them right or wrong,” Chiu said. “[A]ll I’ll try to do in the making of Seediq Bale is to represent the Wushe Incident from the point of view of the Seediq people of the 1930s who lived through the events.”
“For me, a people’s culture exists not in tourism promotion brochures, nor in products displayed at tourist attractions. Instead, it sometimes exists in a dying tribesman’s closet, where a worn-out hand-woven cloak could better reflect the culture,” Chiu said. “People in Taiwan lack a common memory. It’s sad that we’ve grown up under the influence of Mickey Mouse or Doraemon but have only vague knowledge of the original residents of this land.”
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