At a showing Sunday night of Wu Yi-feng (吳乙峰)'s documentary Life, the director said that many people -- families and couples -- embraced each other and cried after watching his film. Wu himself admitted that he broke down numerous times while making it.
His documentary is a record of the stark realities of life after the deadly 921 Earthquake. Wu lived for three years in Chiufen Twin Peaks, one of the areas hardest hit by the 7.6-magnitude quake and just 50km west of Sun Moon Lake. There he filmed and observed the survivors dealing with the deaths of their loved ones.
Life opens with efforts to dig out the bodies of those who were buried alive in massive landslides triggered by shifts in the surrounding mountains.
One section of the documentary has a narrative by a daughter whose parents were killed in the quake. She begs for forgiveness from them for becoming pregnant out of wedlock because of her overwhelming sense of loneliness. Life also records the story of two young girls who were working in sales in Taipei and had sent as much of their meager incomes back to their home in rural Chungliao Township to help their father repay his debts.
After the quake, the girls returned home to find both of their parents dead and where their house once stood, only sand.
The film ends with the sound of excavating equipment.
Wu told the group that he hopes that everyone, but particularly bickering politicians, will go to the theater to watch the documentary to help them "regain softness in their hearts."
Minister of Education Tu Cheng-sheng (杜正勝) said yesterday that the film is so touching that it should be transcribed and used in school textbooks. The film shows how brutal nature can be when its forces destroy lives and the landscape, Tu said.
"This forces viewers to rethink the meaning of their lives," Tu said.
Huang Yue-suei (黃月綏), a national policy adviser to the Presidential Office, said she had decided to donate half of her salary for this month -- about NT$70,000 -- to Wu as a tiny contribution to help him balance his company's finances, which have been in the red over the past five years because of his single-mindedness about shooting a documentary on the earthquake.
According to Wu, Life won third place in the Yamagawa International Documentary Festival last year. After the showing, Wu said, a middle-aged Japanese man approached him, crying, and said that the film reminded him of his father whom he had refused to meet for decades.
After getting an overwhelming reception in Japan, Wu said Life was shown at the Nantes Three Continents Film Festival in France, where it won an Audience Prize.
Life is one of a series of documentaries on the 921 Earthquake, which include films by two other directors who stayed even longer in central Taiwan for their shooting.
The 921 Earthquake was the nation's deadliest in five dec-ades, killing 2,415 people and injuring more than 10,000. More than 100,000 residents were displaced, and property damage was on a massive scale.
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