Argentine filmmaker Marcos Rodriguez, whose 2016 documentary Arribenos explored the lives of Taiwanese immigrants in Buenos Aires, plans to shoot a sequel in Taiwan.
The Ministry of Culture is reviewing the storyboard — which is to follow immigrants to Argentina on their return to Taiwan — to determine if it qualifies for an international coproduction grant.
Rodriguez said his interest in Taiwanese culture and inspiration for making Arribenos grew out of his admiration for Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) and Taipei-based filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮).
Rodriguez named the film after the main street that runs through Buenos Aires’ Barrio Chino, or Chinatown, which flourished as a center of Taiwanese culture during a surge in immigration during the 1980s.
Perhaps because of the era in which the immigration took place, the Barrio Chino has a nostalgic, stuck-in-time quality that brings to mind the atmosphere of some of Hou’s classic films, he said.
To prepare for the movie, Rodriguez said he studied Taiwanese culture for a year before spending another year filming in Barrio Chino, capturing holiday gatherings, religious ceremonies and karaoke parties.
Rodriguez said he discovered that a considerable number of Taiwanese immigrants left Argentina during the 2001 financial crisis.
Since then, he has become increasingly curious about what became of them after returning to Taiwan and what memories they had of their time in Argentina, he said.
In coming to Taiwan to make a sequel, Rodriguez hopes to complement the story told in the 2016 documentary, and give a fuller picture of the rich and varied experiences of Taiwanese immigrants, he said.
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