Departing from a narrative about the city’s misfits and the displaced in A Place of One’s Own (一席之地, 2009), writer-director Lou Yi-an (樓一安) turns to rural underdogs for his second feature film The Losers (廢物), a socially-conscious drama that tackles some of the difficult issues facing Taiwan’s farming villages as told through the stories of those deemed “losers.”
Articulately written and finely executed, the film is a brave probe into the dark sides of rural life that finds little, if any, treatment in the current genre-inclined Taiwanese cinema.
Among Lou’s losers, Shiou, played by theater veteran Hsu Hua-chien (徐華謙), is a struggling stage actor in Taipei who works odd jobs to make ends meet. Frustrated, he returns to his Greater Kaohsiung suburb hometown, Meinong (美濃), only to be greeted with a disapproving look from his aging father, who claims that those who stay in town are either drug addicts or jobless.
Photo Courtesy of Good Days Film
While trying to learn about his farmer father’s trade and grow tomatoes on the family farm, Shiou meets an old girlfriend, Mei-shia, played by Tsou singer and actress Paicx Yatauyungana, better known by her Chinese name, Kao Hui-chun (高慧君). Now married, Mei-shia lives an affluent but spiritless life in a mansion along with her teenage son Ah-pan (Pan Chin-yu, 潘親御), as the husband and father, Tian-jin (Lin Chih-ju, 林志儒), spends most of the time away in China, accumulating wealth.
Soon, the flame is rekindled between the failed actor and the bored wife.
Ah-pan, a typically troubled teen, befriends classmate Yu-mei (Chiu Su-chin), a girl from a poor household barely sustained by her Vietnamese mother. Unable to find work after a serious workplace injury, Yu-mei’s father has been in and out of jail for stealing to support his drug habit.
The newly found friendship between the two turns into a romance, then a romance in jeopardy when Yu-mei finds out about Ah-pan’s ketamine abuse, which offers a quick escape from the dead-end mentality of small town life.
Meanwhile, real-estate speculators have been systematically buying the fertile land of Meinong, aiming at property development. Shiou’s family farm is no exception from the development craze, and industrialist Tian-jin is eager to get his hands on it.
Compared to the director’s loud, uneven debut feature, The Losers suggests a more assured direction that lays out the multitude of issues Lou wishes to examine at a thoughtful pace. Drug abuse, rural poverty and land exploitation are among the most obvious. Looming in the background is the omnipotent force of capitalist globalization, colluding with misguided agricultural policies.
And it is the underprivileged who are hit the hardest. A sense of defeat pervades the film, whether an aging farmer, Southeast Asian immigrant, disillusioned youth or an Aboriginal resident, unnamed and unrecognizable on her own land. At one point, the simmering discontent and frustration boil over, somewhat feebly, through the character of Ah-pan, who, high on ketamine, sinks back into oblivion while listening to the sound of Kou Chou Ching’s (拷秋勤) Civil Revolt (官逼民反), a song that has often been played over the past few months at protests on Ketagalan Boulevard.
But Lou deals with this raw anger intelligently. As in his previous work, he uses dark humor to examine injustice and oppression. It mocks and makes the unbearable absurd and comic, while adorning his characters and their struggles with a new sense of warmth.
Along with Cho Li’s (卓立) less successful The Rice Bomber (白米炸彈客), which opened in local theaters last month, The Losers brings a largely absent and thus much-needed focus on Taiwan’s rural life, raise important, difficult questions in a manner accessible to anyone who is concerned.
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
There are shadowy cabals plotting to sell out Taiwan to be annexed by China, by invasion if necessary. Fortunately, they are buffoons. In 2019, former Bamboo Union gangster and founder of the China Unification Promotion Party (CUPP), Chang An-le (張安樂, colorfully known as “White Wolf”), led a protest at the Legislative Yuan against comments made by then-premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) that in the event of an attack by China, he would never surrender, but would protect the nation by fighting to the end, even if he only had a broom. Chang had party members bring a wooden casket that they
Taiwan’s drone exports are taking off, fuelled by the war in Ukraine, as Taiwanese companies seek a stake in the fast-growing global market for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Low-cost drones used for reconnaissance and strikes are in high demand as governments around the world boost defense spending in the face of intensifying conflicts. A relative new player in the increasingly competitive industry, Taiwan’s pitch is to be an “Asian hub” for the production of UAVs and components free of Chinese materials, or “non-red.” That means its UAVs can be up to three times more expensive than their Chinese competitors, like the world’s biggest
RSS