The stunning aerial photography featured in Beyond Beauty: Taiwan From Above (看見台灣) has helped the film to generate NT$11 million (US$373,300) at the weekend box office, more than any other documentary has made in its local premiere week.
The 93-minute film netted NT$5.72 million in Taipei alone from its release from Friday to Sunday, distributor Activator Marketing Co said. Now showing at 44 cinemas nationwide, it is also the widest release ever of a locally made documentary, the company said.
In the film, director Chi Po-lin (齊柏林), known for his aerial still photography, brings together rare bird’s-eye glimpses of Taiwan’s natural beauty, from mountains to oceans and everything in between, to forge a penetrating message about the importance of environmental protection.
“I love Taiwan very, very much, so I want to express my feelings for this land through the film. I want to faithfully show Taiwan’s land, in its true form,” Chi said in a recent promotional video aimed at raising funds for an outdoor premiere of the film, which took almost NT$100 million and over three years, including 400 hours in the air, to complete.
“The biggest goal of this film is to let everyone ‘see’ Taiwan, to know and cherish our homeland,” said the 49-year-old, who worked as a civil servant before deciding to give up his job — and pension — to dedicate himself to the project.
The documentary is narrated by writer and director Wu Nien-chen (吳念真). Nolay Piho, an Aboriginal pastor and actor better known by his Chinese name Lin Ching-tai (林慶台), also wrote and performed some of the songs in the film.
The film has been nominated for best documentary and best original film score at the 50th Golden Horse Awards, which will be held on Nov. 23.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching