It is hard to imagine a mediocre film coming from accomplished director Wang Toon (王童), best known for his Taiwan trilogy, Strawman (稻草人, 1987), Banana Paradise (香蕉天堂, 1989) and Hill of No Return (無言的山丘, 1992). But Where the Wind Settles (風中家族), Wang’s ambitious epic work that spans over six decades, from the 1940s to the present, seriously misses the mark and fails to deliver its promising story about the diaspora experience of his and his parents’ generation, who fled to Taiwan after the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lost the civil war to the communists.
To Wang, who left China for Taiwan with his family in 1949 when he was seven, the project is undoubtedly close to his heart, but ends up being lost.
The film begins on the battlefield where KMT troops flee from the doomed battles against the communists. Injured, captain Sheng (Tony Yang, 楊祐寧) is among the last to retreat, followed by his subordinates Shun (Lee Hsiao-chuan, 李曉川) and Fan (George Hu, 胡宇威). During their trek across the Chinese outback to escape the pursuing enemy, they rescue an abandoned boy named Feng Hsien and adopt him as their own son.
Soon, the four manage to get on a ship bound for Keelung.
What greets them in the foreign land is a dilapidated, leaking hut in a crowded veteran’s village, or juancun (眷村). Down and out, the three men and their adopted son struggle to start a new life. While Shun’s marriage with Yu (Alice Ko, 柯佳嬿), an earthy Taiwanese woman, ends prematurely in a tragic fire, Sheng’s secret love for Chiu Hsiang (Bea Hayden, 郭碧婷), a professor’s daughter, doesn’t bear fruit. Chiu Hsiang later leaves for the US.
Years have gone by, and Feng Hsien (Mason Lee, 李淳), all grown up, marries Chiu Mei (Amber Kuo, 郭采潔), Chiu Hsiang’s younger sister, forming the kind of family that his caregivers long for, but are never able to achieve.
Sheng dies of heart attack before he can return to his homeland, which was impossible while he was alive due to a travel ban across the Taiwan Strait.
In a coda, the gray-haired Feng Hsien visits Sheng’s hometown in China, only to find that the captain’s wife passed away, heartbroken.
Following director Niu Chen-zer’s (鈕承澤) Paradise in Service (軍中樂園) last year, Where the Wind Settles is another ambitious attempt to capture a turbulent chapter in history through a story of personal tragedy, longing and strength. Yet, its elliptic storytelling and sketchy script fail to provide an emotional ground for the characters to develop. Devoid of flesh and blood, they are like pale, cut-out characters drifting from one historical event to another.
The fear and relentless oppression during the White Terror era is only briefly touched on through a sequence in which Chiu Hsiang’s father is taken away by the secret police.
In the otherwise flat film, Yang invests a much needed dose of genuineness in his role as a displaced man trapped faraway in nostalgia for his home. However, apart from Yang, most of the actors are miscast. Mason Lee, Ang Lee’s (李安) 25-year-old son, for example, really has no business playing Feng Hsien, unless there is a good reason why a character coming from a Chinese village should speak Mandarin with an American accent. His pairing with Kuo, appearing as dull as ever, generates a stiff, if not entirely disastrous, performance.
After a long hiatus from feature filmmaking, director Wang makes an unsuccessful foray into Taiwan’s modern history, both personal and collective, and hopefully, it is just a bumpy beginning of many new films to come.
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
At Computex 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) urged the government to subsidize AI. “All schools in Taiwan must integrate AI into their curricula,” he declared. A few months earlier, he said, “If I were a student today, I’d immediately start using tools like ChatGPT, Gemini Pro and Grok to learn, write and accelerate my thinking.” Huang sees the AI-bullet train leaving the station. And as one of its drivers, he’s worried about youth not getting on board — bad for their careers, and bad for his workforce. As a semiconductor supply-chain powerhouse and AI hub wannabe, Taiwan is seeing
Jade Mountain (玉山) — Taiwan’s highest peak — is the ultimate goal for those attempting a through-hike of the Mountains to Sea National Greenway (山海圳國家綠道), and that’s precisely where we’re headed in this final installment of a quartet of articles covering the Greenway. Picking up the trail at the Tsou tribal villages of Dabang and Tefuye, it’s worth stocking up on provisions before setting off, since — aside from the scant offerings available on the mountain’s Dongpu Lodge (東埔山莊) and Paiyun Lodge’s (排雲山莊) meal service — there’s nowhere to get food from here on out. TEFUYE HISTORIC TRAIL The journey recommences with
RSS