The documentary Beyond Beauty: Taiwan From Above (看見台灣) has overtaken Go Grandriders (不老騎士) as the highest-grossing documentary in the nation’s history, the film’s distributor said yesterday.
Over the weekend, Beyond Beauty broke the NT$30 million (US$1.01 million) box office record set by Go Grandriders, according to Activator Marketing Co.
TEN-DAY RECORD
Beyond Beauty, which captures the beauty of the nation from the air, set a new box-office record by grossing more than NT$35 million just 10 days after opening on Nov. 1.
Go Grandriders, a story about 17 elderly men who embarked on a motorcycle journey around the country, took 63 days to reach the NT$30 million mark.
BIGGEST DAY
The highest single-day gross for Beyond Beauty was Nov. 9, when it raked in NT$6.5 million countrywide, Activator Marketing said.
Celebrities and other prominent figures have given the film positive reviews and it is currently being screened in 51 cinemas around the nation.
Chinese pro-democracy activist Wang Dan (王丹), a student leader in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China, said on his Facebook page on Sunday that words could not express how touched he was by the film.
“I think anyone who has seen this documentary would fall in love with this country,” Wang wrote.
MESSAGE
The documentary was made over a period of more than three years by director Chi Po-lin (齊柏林), an aerial photographer and former civil servant who quit his job to pursue the project.
It gives viewers rare bird’s-eye glimpses of Taiwan’s natural beauty, from mountains to oceans, and sends a strong message about the importance of environmental protection.
Kenting National Park service technician Yang Jien-fon (楊政峰) won a silver award in World Grand Prix Photography Awards Spring Season for his photograph of two male rat snakes intertwined in combat. Yang’s colleagues at Kenting National Park said he is a master of nature photography who has been held back by his job in civil service. The awards accept entries in all four seasons across six categories: architectural and urban photography, black-and-white and fine art photography, commercial and fashion photography, documentary and people photography, nature and experimental photography, and mobile photography. Awards are ranked according to scores and divided into platinum, gold and
More than half of the bamboo vipers captured in Tainan in the past few years were found in the city’s Sinhua District (新化), while other districts had smaller catches or none at all. Every year, Tainan captures about 6,000 snakes which have made their way into people’s homes. Of the six major venomous snakes in Taiwan, the cobra, the many-banded krait, the brown-spotted pit viper and the bamboo viper are the most frequently captured. The high concentration of bamboo vipers captured in Sinhua District is puzzling. Tainan Agriculture Bureau Forestry and Nature Conservation Division head Chu Chien-ming (朱健明) earlier this week said that the
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The first bluefin tuna of the season, brought to shore in Pingtung County and weighing 190kg, was yesterday auctioned for NT$10,600 (US$333.5) per kilogram, setting a record high for the local market. The auction was held at the fish market in Donggang Fishing Harbor, where the Siaoliouciou Island-registered fishing vessel Fu Yu Ching No. 2 delivered the “Pingtung First Tuna” it had caught for bidding. Bidding was intense, and the tuna was ultimately jointly purchased by a local restaurant and a local company for NT$10,600 per kilogram — NT$300 ,more than last year — for a total of NT$2.014 million. The 67-year-old skipper