2013 has been a productive year as new talents and filmmaking veterans hand in solid and sometimes ingenious works. One offering that has earned approval from audiences as well as critics is Zone Pro Site (總舖師), an emotionally engaging comedy that marks the fanfared comeback of director Chen Yu-hsun (陳玉勳) after a 16-year hiatus. Part of a recent wave of Taiwanese movies that emphasize local culture and identities, Chen’s work centers on bandoh (辦桌) — a unique form of Taiwanese banquet culture — and benefits greatly from a clever script loaded with grassroots humor and zestful character archetypes such as the loud-mouthed mother and small-time gangsters. The story is as boisterous and delightfully messy as its whimsical characters, and at the same time clings to universal emotions that go beyond borders.
Following his melodramatic When Love Comes (當愛來的時候, 2010), Chang Tso-chi (張作驥) turns his lens to childhood with A Time in Quchi (暑假作業), which follows a 10-year-old boy left by his parents to the care of his grandfather in a hilly village outside Taipei during summer break. The sense of hopelessness and the inescapable fatalism that defined Chang’s early works such as Ah Chung (忠仔, 1996) and Darkness and Light (黑暗時光, 1999) have almost vanished. Instead, warmth and a sense of living life as it is permeate the boy’s journey, as he tries to survive in a rural community devoid of urban comforts and is emotionally marked by the experience.
Starring Joseph Chang (張孝全) and Jimmy Wong (王羽), Chung Mong-hong’s (鍾孟宏) third feature film Soul (失魂) tackles father-son relationships — a recurrent theme in Chung’s cinema — under the guise of a psychological thriller in which a possessed man goes on a killing spree. With his expressive and opulent cinematography, distinctive approach to storytelling and the same cast of actors from previous works, Chung, who doubles as the cinematographer for all his films, firmly establishes a unique aesthetic expression and sensibility with his third feature.
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Return to Burma (歸來的人) and Poor Folk (窮人。榴槤。麻藥。偷渡客) herald the emergence of the film auteur that is Midi Zhao (趙德胤), aka Midi Z. An ethnic Chinese born and raised in Myanmar, the 31-year-old director returned to his homeland at the height of its 2010 democratic elections to make his feature debut Return to Burma after years of exile in Taiwan. The next year, he followed it up with Poor Folk. Shot by a small crew with a consumer-grade digital camera, Midi Z’s cinematic world is populated by underemployed young men hanging around and comparing their meager salaries, or prating about their planned escapes to neighboring countries. A sense of alienation permeates, while displacement is an inevitability of fate. It is raw, gritty cinema that offers poignant insights into a region that had been largely unknown to the rest of the world.
New York-based Taiwanese filmmaker Chen Ming-lang’s (陳敏郎) feature debut Tomorrow Comes Today (你的今天和我的明天) conjures up the cinema of Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮) in that they both require considerable intellectual effort on behalf of the audience. Built around a narrative structure that is fragmented and sometimes elusive, the film centers on a food delivery boy from Taiwan who searches for his mother in New York with a photo of Marlene Dietrich. His neighbor Wayne, whom he never meets, makes a living by cleaning payphones at night, while trying to forget about his ex-girlfriend by following instructions from videotaped lessons. Like Tsai’s works, the film oozes with symbolism, using elements such as muteness and old sentimental songs to weave together a peculiar tale about migration and self-identity.
In the non-fiction realm, up-and-coming director Chung Chuan’s (鍾權) Face to Face (正面迎擊) breaks away from his oeuvre of prettily packaged motivational documentaries and instead paints an intimate portrait of a group of struggling men. Clearly forming a close relationship with his subjects — wrestlers who are frustrated and denied chances in life to self-actualize and gain confidence in the ring — Chung doesn’t shy away from recording the ego clashes that create antagonism and hurt among those involved. Neither is he afraid to become an active participant in the film and capture stirred-up emotions with his observant camera. The resulting work is an intelligent reflection on the art of wrestling as scripted entertainment, which asks the viewer to think twice before making a quick decision on what is authentic and what is not.
Photo courtesy of Good Day Films
Photo courtesy of Activator Marketing Company
Photo courtesy of Activator Marketing Company
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Photo courtesy of Swallow Wings Films
Photo courtesy of Swallow Wings Films
The year was 1991. A Toyota Land Cruiser set out on a 67km journey up the Junda Forest Road (郡大林道) toward an old loggers’ camp, at which point the hikers inside would get out and begin their ascent of Jade Mountain (玉山). Little did they know, they would be the last group of hikers to ever enjoy this shortcut into the mountains. An approaching typhoon soon wiped out the road behind them, trapping the vehicle on the mountain and forever changing the approach to Jade Mountain. THE CONTEMPORARY ROUTE Nowadays, the approach to Jade Mountain from the north side takes an
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and