When moviemakers successfully use a location’s history and environment to tell a story that attracts interest in that area, everyone’s a winner. Think Cape No. 7 (海角七號) and the waves of tourists it brought to Hengchun (恆春).
Shot in Kinmen, Our Island, Our Dreams (星月無盡) is a light-hearted romance that dwells on the island’s photogenic features to the detriment of an absorbing tale.
The story centers on three best friends who grow up together in Kinmen. As Xin Jun (Chen Yi-han, 陳意涵) becomes a pretty young woman, A-wu (Matt Wu, 吳中天) and A-jin (Chen Cheng-wei, 陳正偉) find their feelings for their childhood buddy changing. They hide this new affection in order to protect their friendship.
Along comes Han Wei (Huang Shih-yuen, 黃世元), a young soldier from the main island who rocks the boat by wooing Xin Jun despite her repeated rejections. She succumbs to his advances, a happenstance that triggers memories of her elder sister De Yue’s (Yang Kuei-mei, 楊貴媚) fate after falling in love with an officer who was transferred and never returned.
Director Peter Tamg’s (唐振瑜) myopic filmmaking casts Kinmen in the central role. A-wu, a local cultural worker, is a convenient vehicle to introduce audiences to the island’s landscapes, its traditions and history. The temple, ancient houses and underground fort are all pleasant enough to look at, but instead of being an integral part of the narrative, they are little more than travel guide illustrations.
College students-turned-TV personalities, brought to the public’s attention after appearing in the variety show University (大學生了沒), were cast as soldiers in flashback sequences that recreate life in the 1970s. Anecdotes about how tens of thousands of enlisted men during that era competed to chase some local skirt are intended to bring comic relief, but the humor feels tired and the novice actors lack on-screen charisma.
While Cape No. 7 shows how a successful movie can boost local tourism, films like Our Island, Our Dreams, which is undermined by a dull script, unimaginative filmmaking and flat acting, risk being relegated to the “glorified tourism advertisement” genre.
It seems every few days one bumps into one of those “real man” comments in which Taiwan is urged to “face reality” or similar, and “make a deal,” with the speaker implying that soon it will be too late. “Deal” advocates always present themselves as having a superior grip on reality, and the manly ability to make the “hard choice.” Their testosterone-laden language often echoes that of Taiwan sellout advocates. Note that such commentary always specifies a process (“make a deal, work with, make progress”), never the end state of what occupation by a violent authoritarian colonialist state will entail. In
There are shadowy cabals plotting to sell out Taiwan to be annexed by China, by invasion if necessary. Fortunately, they are buffoons. In 2019, former Bamboo Union gangster and founder of the China Unification Promotion Party (CUPP), Chang An-le (張安樂, colorfully known as “White Wolf”), led a protest at the Legislative Yuan against comments made by then-premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) that in the event of an attack by China, he would never surrender, but would protect the nation by fighting to the end, even if he only had a broom. Chang had party members bring a wooden casket that they
June 1 to June 7 "If all Taiwanese were as afraid of dying as you, then what would happen?” Physician Shih Chiang-nan (施江南) reportedly said this to his wife Chen Chiao-tung (陳焦桐) after she urged him to stop intervening on behalf of Taiwanese soldiers stranded overseas after serving in the Japanese Army during World War II. Shih had clashed with high-ranking officials over the issue, engaged in several heated arguments with Taiwan governor-general Chen Yi (陳儀) and allegedly shouted at general Ko Yuan-fen (柯遠芬), chief of staff of the Taiwan Garrison Command, over
Taiwan’s English education system is being pulled apart by three opposing forces. Bilingual Nation 2030 pulls students toward English and global communication. Artificial Intelligence (AI) readiness pulls them toward digital judgment, verification and AI-mediated work. But Taiwan’s old exam culture pulls them back toward memorization, grammar drills, timed reading and correct answers. If the education system keeps using old exams to define success, it risks producing graduates who are neither genuinely bilingual nor genuinely AI-ready, but trained for tasks machines can already perform. The first force is Bilingual Nation 2030. Launched in 2018, the policy aimed to “help Taiwan’s workforce connect
RSS