A Berlin Film Festival entry in February of this year and strongly recommended by Japan's Ministry of Education and Science, God's Children has won recognition not because of flashy visuals, but because it is the first film to reveal people's lives in the largest slum in the world.
Nina is a 12-year-old girl who lives with her family beside a garbage dump in a suburb of Manila. Every day she follows her family, climbing the 50m tall "garbage mountain" to collect recyclable goods. The dirt, the smell, the flies all around and the vast mountain of garbage are her neighbors, but she doesn't care. She has been out of school for a year and she's hoping the goods she collects can afford her another year of school.
PHOTO COURTESY OF CROWN FILMS
There are 18,000 households like Nina's living in the slum. There are 90,000 people living in the narrow alley between the two mountains of garbage. In July of 2000, one of the mountains collapsed due to heavy rain, burying 500 households and some 900 people. Only 300 bodies were found. The government closed the two dumping sites, the only means of making a living for those who lived there.
"Give us garbage!" became the protest slogan for residents marching through the streets of Manila.
Japanese documentary maker Shinomiya Hiroshi shows admirable strength and compassion, having lived with the residents for six months in order to make his documentary. Not only did he capture the devastating garbage landslide, but he entered the lives of those families and witnessed death, desperation and even hope.
In the ending scenes of the film, when the first garbage truck returns to the site after a year's absence, the villagers are overjoyed. Everyone from kids to the elderly, eagerly clamber up the mountain in their rubber boots carrying their tools, ready to work past the setting sun.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
RSS