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.
May 26 to June 1 When the Qing Dynasty first took control over many parts of Taiwan in 1684, it roughly continued the Kingdom of Tungning’s administrative borders (see below), setting up one prefecture and three counties. The actual area of control covered today’s Chiayi, Tainan and Kaohsiung. The administrative center was in Taiwan Prefecture, in today’s Tainan. But as Han settlement expanded and due to rebellions and other international incidents, the administrative units became more complex. By the time Taiwan became a province of the Qing in 1887, there were three prefectures, eleven counties, three subprefectures and one directly-administered prefecture, with
President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday delivered an address marking the first anniversary of his presidency. In the speech, Lai affirmed Taiwan’s global role in technology, trade and security. He announced economic and national security initiatives, and emphasized democratic values and cross-party cooperation. The following is the full text of his speech: Yesterday, outside of Beida Elementary School in New Taipei City’s Sanxia District (三峽), there was a major traffic accident that, sadly, claimed several lives and resulted in multiple injuries. The Executive Yuan immediately formed a task force, and last night I personally visited the victims in hospital. Central government agencies and the
Among Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) villages, a certain rivalry exists between Arunothai, the largest of these villages, and Mae Salong, which is currently the most prosperous. Historically, the rivalry stems from a split in KMT military factions in the early 1960s, which divided command and opium territories after Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) cut off open support in 1961 due to international pressure (see part two, “The KMT opium lords of the Golden Triangle,” on May 20). But today this rivalry manifests as a different kind of split, with Arunothai leading a pro-China faction and Mae Salong staunchly aligned to Taiwan.
As with most of northern Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) settlements, the village of Arunothai was only given a Thai name once the Thai government began in the 1970s to assert control over the border region and initiate a decades-long process of political integration. The village’s original name, bestowed by its Yunnanese founders when they first settled the valley in the late 1960s, was a Chinese name, Dagudi (大谷地), which literally translates as “a place for threshing rice.” At that time, these village founders did not know how permanent their settlement would be. Most of Arunothai’s first generation were soldiers
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