Ten Nights of Dreams
Back in 1990 the late Akira Kurosawa made a film called Dreams, a compilation of good dreams and nightmares the director had had over the years. This film has the same idea - a bunch of dreams tagged together - but uses different directors for each of the 10 entries. Contributors include Takashi Shimizu (director of the Grudge series) and veteran Kon Ichikawa.
Vengeance
Get your grindhouse fix with this 2006 flick from Thailand, screening in tandem with its DVD release. A cop and his team hunt a prison escapee in a forest teeming with dangerous and strange creatures and unknown evil forces. Could this be a metaphor for the Muslim insurgency in southern Thailand? Either way, the basic set-up and the location are in debt to Predator and maybe Jurassic Park, with some mysticism thrown into the pot.
Purple Ribbon Film Festival
You could be forgiven for feeling worn out by all the film festivals at the moment. This one, however, deserves a late mention. The Purple Ribbon Film Festival in Taipei County is again promoting dialogue
on how to deal with domestic violence and child abuse and includes some fine titles. Still to be screened are Cristina Comencini's Don't Tell, Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin, Pedro Almodovar's Volver, Ghyslaine Cote's The Five of Us and Kay Pollak's As It Is in Heaven. Screening at Aletheia (Tamsui campus), Shih Hsin and Fu Jen Catholic universities from Tuesday to Thursday next week, then concluding at Tamkang University from Oct. 22 to Oct. 24 and the National Taiwan University of Arts on Oct. 23. Web site: blog.yam.com/purpleribbon.
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
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
Even by the standards of Ukraine’s International Legion, which comprises volunteers from over 55 countries, Han has an unusual backstory. Born in Taichung, he grew up in Costa Rica — then one of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies — where a relative worked for the embassy. After attending an American international high school in San Jose, Costa Rica’s capital, Han — who prefers to use only his given name for OPSEC (operations security) reasons — moved to the US in his teens. He attended Penn State University before returning to Taiwan to work in the semiconductor industry in Kaohsiung, where he
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