“Don’t take being remembered for granted,” director Hsu Tzu-jou (徐紫柔) narrates in one scene of her documentary, Zombie Film with Grandpas and Grandmas (邀阿公阿嬤拍B級殭屍片). The wacky title and hilarious antics of the mostly elderly actors cannot hide the heartbreaking fact that the star of the show, Hsu’s then 94-year-old (now 96) grandmother, suffers from dementia.
Filmed over the course of four years, the documentary follows Hsu’s efforts to make a B-movie about Power Rangers saving the world from memory-devouring zombies, featuring her family members and other amateur thespians she recruited with great effort from their Taoyuan neighborhood and beyond. Playing the Pink Power Ranger in full costume with gusto, granny Chung Ching-mei (鐘景妹) is a natural showwoman, but she can barely remember one line at a time and often has no idea what she is doing.
Diagnosed with mild dementia 10 years prior to filming, Chung still largely retains her long-term memory but forgets most of the things that happened in the present. But she remains positive and cheerful for the most part, and with timely medical treatment and attentive care by her family, she’s still able to live a happy life. Part of Hsu’s motivation for making the documentary is to promote awareness of dementia, which affects 460,000 people in Taiwan, and show that with early detection and proper management, the condition is manageable.
Photo courtesy of Sky Digital Entertainment
Hsu first began filming amusing skits featuring Chung and other relatives donning various costumes just to keep her grandmother’s mind active. The videos unexpectedly became a social media sensation, leading to many public performance opportunities. But since Chung was unable to remember the lines and actions for an entire show, Hsu decided to feature her in a movie instead, where she could complete one scene at a time. Titled Memory Rangers (記憶戰士), the movie conveys Hsu’s idea that every young person can serve as a “memory warrior” to slow the deterioration of the faltering brains of their elderly loved ones.
What’s surprising is Hsu’s drive to execute this endeavor properly despite little experience and much uncertainty. She holds auditions, hires a film crew with makeup artists and tirelessly tries to get community members involved — one scene shows about 80 extras playing zombies who descend upon scenic sand dunes by the sea. Much of the comedic effect is provided by unintentionally funny and self-deprecating actors recruited from the 800-strong Taoyuan Golden Voice Singing Club (金嗓歌友會), a thriving senior social group boasting many hidden talents itching to strut their stuff.
Hsu successfully takes an otherwise grave and serious topic and puts an overwhelmingly positive spin on it. Aside from her gregarious family members who aren’t shy to poke fun at themselves and act ridiculous, Hsu managed to conscript just the right characters to make the whole thing an extremely entertaining affair. While one does not feel pity for Chung even as she struggles to recite a single sentence — especially since she doesn’t seem to mind herself — her condition still results in many tear-jerking moments.
Photo courtesy of Sky Digital Entertainment
The finished 20-minute movie can be found on the family’s YouTube channel, but the documentary doesn’t mention that — which was one of the main audience criticisms during Tuesday’s test screening. The videos weren’t easy to search for either, accessible in three segments at: www.youtube.com/@user-gw9pt2mn2x.
Photo courtesy of Sky Digital Entertainment
Photo courtesy of Sky Digital Entertainment
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
My previous column Donovan’s Deep Dives: The powerful political force that vanished from the English press on April 23 began with three paragraphs of what would be to most English-language readers today incomprehensible gibberish, but are very typical descriptions of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) internal politics in the local Chinese-language press. After a quiet period in the early 2010s, the English press stopped writing about the DPP factions, the factions changed and eventually local English-language journalists could not reintroduce the subject without a long explanation on the context that would not fit easily in a typical news article. That previous
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Years ago, I was thrilled when I came across a map online showing a fun weekend excursion: a long motorcycle ride into the mountains of Pingtung County (屏東) going almost up to the border with Taitung County (台東), followed by a short hike up to a mountain lake with the mysterious name of “Small Ghost Lake” (小鬼湖). I shared it with a more experienced hiking friend who then proceeded to laugh. Apparently, this road had been taken out by landslides long before and was never going to be fixed. Reaching the lake this way — or any way that would