Four years in the making, the recently-completed documentary Hong Kong: Out of the Shadows attempts to highlight how the world-famous city is still struggling to achieve full democracy — 16 years after its British overlords left one of their last colonial outposts.
Film-maker, journalist and sometime contributor to the Taipei Times, Sam Wild spent four years making the film, including two years editing in Taiwan. Wild charts the rise of the city’s 2009 to 2010 youth-lead protest movement and presents a multitude of voices in a bid to explore how economic inequalities are intrinsically linked to the nature of Hong Kong’s unique political landscape.
To explain the arcane and complex nature of the city’s political system, Wild interviewed dozens of key political leaders to find out why this semi-autonomous East Asian metropolis is still largely governed by corporate interest groups.
Photo courtesy of Sam Wild
The film also tells the parallel stories of two Hong Kong residents — a wealthy UK expat and an impoverished middle-aged Chinese migrant. Amid all the politics and injustice, Wild also explores the landscape of this city of seven million people and reminds us that this vast urban world is the most crowded place on earth.
The screening takes place tomorrow at 7:30pm at Taitung City’s Eslite Bookstore, 2F, 478, Boai Rd, Taitung County (台東市博愛路478號), tel: (08) 933-0388.
In the mainstream view, the Philippines should be worried that a conflict over Taiwan between the superpowers will drag in Manila. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr observed in an interview in The Wall Street Journal last year, “I learned an African saying: When elephants fight, the only one that loses is the grass. We are the grass in this situation. We don’t want to get trampled.” Such sentiments are widespread. Few seem to have imagined the opposite: that a gray zone incursion of People’s Republic of China (PRC) ships into the Philippines’ waters could trigger a conflict that drags in Taiwan. Fewer
March 18 to March 24 Yasushi Noro knew that it was not the right time to scale Hehuan Mountain (合歡). It was March 1913 and the weather was still bitingly cold at high altitudes. But he knew he couldn’t afford to wait, either. Launched in 1910, the Japanese colonial government’s “five year plan to govern the savages” was going well. After numerous bloody battles, they had subdued almost all of the indigenous peoples in northeastern Taiwan, save for the Truku who held strong to their territory around the Liwu River (立霧溪) and Mugua River (木瓜溪) basins in today’s Hualien County (花蓮). The Japanese
Pei-Ru Ko (柯沛如) says her Taipei upbringing was a little different from her peers. “We lived near the National Palace Museum [north of Taipei] and our neighbors had rice paddies. They were growing food right next to us. There was a mountain and a river so people would say, ‘you live in the mountains,’ and my friends wouldn’t want to come and visit.” While her school friends remained a bus ride away, Ko’s semi-rural upbringing schooled her in other things, including where food comes from. “Most people living in Taipei wouldn’t have a neighbor that was growing food,” she says. “So
Whether you’re interested in the history of ceramics, the production process itself, creating your own pottery, shopping for ceramic vessels, or simply admiring beautiful handmade items, the Zhunan Snake Kiln (竹南蛇窯) in Jhunan Township (竹南), Miaoli County, is definitely worth a visit. For centuries, kiln products were an integral part of daily life in Taiwan: bricks for walls, tiles for roofs, pottery for the kitchen, jugs for fermenting alcoholic drinks, as well as decorative elements on temples, all came from kilns, and Miaoli was a major hub for the production of these items. The Zhunan Snake Kiln has a large area dedicated