The epic Taiwanese film Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale, a saga about Taiwanese Aboriginal resistance to Japanese colonial rule, has found a new audience in the exiled Tibetan community in Dharamsala, India.
Tibetan Buddhist monks and young people alike are watching the movie on their TV sets and computers, Tibetan writer and activist Tenzin Tsundue said.
“My friend Dr Tseng Chien-yuan (曾建元) of the National Taiwan University introduced me to the film and gave me a DVD set of it. He even took me with his family to the film’s location on the outskirts of Taipei,” said Tsundue, who later took the movie to his community in India.
Ever since its first screening among Tibetans in July last year, there has been an “unprecedented craze” about the film, he said.
Tibetan activist Dorjee Tsetan said Tibetans can identify with the movie.
“The courage with which Taiwanese fought for freedom against the Japanese is what makes every Tibetan relate to the story of Seediq Bale,” he said.
Directed by Taiwanese director Wei Te-sheng (魏德聖), the 2011 film depicts the tragic Wushe Incident in 1930 when the Seediq tribe, led by one of its leaders, Mona Rudao, rebelled against Japanese rule in central Taiwan.
Tashi Tsering, a Tibetan Buddhist monk who watched the two-part film with other monks from his monastery, said it was at once both great and scary.
“The movie is action-packed — the sword fighting is fantastic — but I was scared most of the time. This is the first Taiwanese film I have ever seen and I love it,” he said.
Sonam Dolker, a young Tibetan teacher, said she was moved to tears by the story.
“I cried when I saw the women hang themselves in despair in the jungle. I wished they had fought alongside the men as my mother did against the invading Chinese army,” Dolker said.
Tsundue drew comparisons between the story of the Seediq tribe and that of the Tibetan people’s struggle for freedom.
“Tibetan self-immolations are efforts to speak to the conscience of the Chinese people,” Tsundae said, referring to Tibetans that have set themselves on fire to protest Chinese rule over Tibet.
However, unlike the tragic ending of the film, Tsundue said, there is hope for Tibet’s future.
“Our struggle for freedom is a challenging one, but we have His Holiness the Dalai Lama with us,” he said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,