Every morning before daybreak, 60-year-old captain Chen Yong-fu (陳永福) and his two-man crew sail out on the Pacific. Carrying 20kg spears, the old fishermen effortlessly balance themselves on the tip of a narrow harpooning platform, looking for the slightest movement in the waves that might reveal the whereabouts of the majestic creatures they are hunting.
A Town Called Success (戰浪), an international co-production between Public Television Service (PTS) and director Frank Smith and cinematographer Rob Taylor from the UK, captures a traditional form of marlin fishing.
According to Jessie Shih (施悅文), deputy director of the international department at Public Television Service Foundation, the 75-minute long documentary is the latest in PTS’s ongoing initiative to use high-definition technology to make documentaries about Taiwan that focus on sustainability, the environment and culture, while offering a chance to share experiences with and learn from international collaborators through co-productions.
Photo courtesy of Public Television Service and Hung Hsiao-min
“When it comes to the digital filmmaking environment and talent, Europe and the US are still far ahead … [With the HD initiative], we aim for productions that possess global values and speak to international audiences,” says Shih, who also produced the film.
Filmed over a 12-month period starting on the Lantern Festival last year, the documentary follows the lives of a group of veteran fishermen in Chenggong (成功, lit: success), a small fishing village in Taitung County.
Without relying on off-screen narration and talking heads, the film allows the town and its inhabitants to speak for themselves through everyday images, revealing a declining hamlet where the elders go about on wheelchairs, and the veteran fishermen find and catch marlin with the skill and instinct of a hunter, rather than relying on modern technology.
Their lifelong practice of traditional harpoon fishing, which was introduced to Taiwan during the Japanese colonial era, has become threatened in a world where small-scale fisheries are replaced by industrial fishing that indiscriminately nets vast quantities of marine life. Audiences soon become aware that the more than the century-old sustainable fishery is a dying trade as younger generations shy away from the arduous occupation, and marine resources gradually shrink.
Captain Chen and other fishermen in the village have joined a conservation project by marine scientist Chiang Wei-chuan (江偉全) to tag and release marlin and other big fish back into the ocean.
For director Smith, the story about the harpoon fishermen in Chenggong has a universal theme that transcends national borders.
“My strongest interest is always finding a story about people’s lives in a changing world and finding how people are coping with their society and the way their society is changing … What goes on in that tiny fishing town in eastern Taiwan is very representative to the rest of the world,” Smith told the Taipei Times via Skype on Tuesday.
Having worked extensively with the BBC, National Geographic, Discovery and other broadcasters, Smith and cinematographer Taylor help to deliver a vivid portrait of Chenggong’s fishing traditions through ingenious cinematography. A wide range of digital cameras are used to film sailfish with underwater equipment, take aerial shots through remote controlled helicopters or offer various perspectives from small Go-pro cameras which can be easily positioned on the small fishing vessel in the rough sea.
Smith describes their shooting on the boat as “physical filming,” as the narrow space makes their work extremely difficult, and the hours spent with the fishermen chasing after one of the fastest fish in the world, which can swim at 80km to 100km per hour, were both exciting and exhausting.
Technology aside, Smith says that the collaboration with PTS allowed him to “go back to a much more purist approach to filmmaking,” whereas much of his previous work focused on “much more factual entertainment and creating drama, creating a situation where you script the story for the audience.”
Smith’s first collaboration with PTS was the 2011 A Year in the Clouds (司馬庫斯), an award-winning documentary about the Atayal (泰雅) village of Smangus (司馬庫斯) deep in the lush mountains of Hsinchu County (新竹縣).
“The stories we did in A Year in the Clouds and A Town Called Success are much more about just letting audiences into a way of life that most audiences will never get to see,” the director says.
“I think it’s very essential documentary-making to understand what’s happening to other cultures, to other societies because it affects us all.”
A Town Called Success will be aired on PTS HD channel today at 12pm and 7:30pm. More information can be found at www.pts.org.tw/success.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
In the aftermath of the 2020 general elections the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) had crushed them in a second landslide in a row, with their presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) winning more votes than any in Taiwan’s history. The KMT did pick up three legislative seats, but the DPP retained an outright majority. To take responsibility for that catastrophic loss, as is customary, party chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) resigned. This would mark the end of an era of how the party operated and the beginning of a new effort at reform, first under