“What is this?” a teacher asks a class of elementary school students. “An elephant,” some boys snicker. “They are testicles, and they are never at the same level. One is always higher than the other,” the teacher explains.
Class is dismissed, and the boys rush out the door, humming a tune using the anatomical terms they just learned.
This is the opening scene of Baseball Boys (野球孩子), a documentary about a baseball team consisting of fifth and sixth graders, mostly Aboriginal boys, from Fuyuan Elementary School (富源國小) in Hualien County.
In terms of subject matter, the film is akin to My Football Summer (奇蹟的夏天). Both follow a group of young athletes undergoing rigorous training for an upcoming national championship. But the two differ in their approach to the genre. If My Football Summer is a novel filled with dramatic moments and a narrative climax, Baseball Boys is a prose poem composed of fragments of everyday life.
Winner of the top prize at the biannual Taiwan International Documentary Festival (台灣國際紀錄片雙年展) last year, this documentary by experienced filmmakers Shen Ko-shang (沈可尚) and Liao Ching-yao (廖敬堯) dispenses with the voice-over and keeps interviews to a minimum. The pace is leisurely and the film dwells on the little things: the silly games two brothers play before bedtime, a girl smacking the back of a boy’s head because she thinks he’s cute, young baseball players turning the school’s playground into a concert hall at night.
Liao and Shen play the role of quiet observers, gazing intimately into the boys’ lives and resisting the temptation to comment. We see a father with serious burn scars on his face, a boy calling his grandmother rather than his parents after the team’s first victory, and a student dreaming of becoming either an athlete or a singer when he grows up. But the camera stops there, leaving members of the audience to formulate their own ideas using their imaginations.
Unlike many sports documentaries, with their high emotion and enthusiasm in the run-up to the big game, Baseball Boys paints a realistic portrait of a group of students on the cusp of adolescence. Because many of the young players will graduate from elementary school after the game, it is a time to bid farewell to childhood and prepare for the trials and tribulations of their teenage years.
The film ends with a new academic year after summer vacation. New faces show up on the baseball team. Boys and girls banter and practice street-dance moves as life goes on in the village.
April 28 to May 4 During the Japanese colonial era, a city’s “first” high school typically served Japanese students, while Taiwanese attended the “second” high school. Only in Taichung was this reversed. That’s because when Taichung First High School opened its doors on May 1, 1915 to serve Taiwanese students who were previously barred from secondary education, it was the only high school in town. Former principal Hideo Azukisawa threatened to quit when the government in 1922 attempted to transfer the “first” designation to a new local high school for Japanese students, leading to this unusual situation. Prior to the Taichung First
When the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese forces 50 years ago this week, it prompted a mass exodus of some 2 million people — hundreds of thousands fleeing perilously on small boats across open water to escape the communist regime. Many ultimately settled in Southern California’s Orange County in an area now known as “Little Saigon,” not far from Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, where the first refugees were airlifted upon reaching the US. The diaspora now also has significant populations in Virginia, Texas and Washington state, as well as in countries including France and Australia.
On April 17, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) launched a bold campaign to revive and revitalize the KMT base by calling for an impromptu rally at the Taipei prosecutor’s offices to protest recent arrests of KMT recall campaigners over allegations of forgery and fraud involving signatures of dead voters. The protest had no time to apply for permits and was illegal, but that played into the sense of opposition grievance at alleged weaponization of the judiciary by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to “annihilate” the opposition parties. Blamed for faltering recall campaigns and faced with a KMT chair
Article 2 of the Additional Articles of the Constitution of the Republic of China (中華民國憲法增修條文) stipulates that upon a vote of no confidence in the premier, the president can dissolve the legislature within 10 days. If the legislature is dissolved, a new legislative election must be held within 60 days, and the legislators’ terms will then be reckoned from that election. Two weeks ago Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) proposed that the legislature hold a vote of no confidence in the premier and dare the president to dissolve the legislature. The legislature is currently controlled
RSS