All Taiwan (全台灣), which features footage from the 1930s, premiered yesterday at the Chin Men Theater in Tainan after the National Museum of History and Tainan National University of the Arts recovered and re-edited the footage.
The film is a 66-minute compilation of four decades-old documentaries, some silent, including the only surviving footage of events from the Japanese colonial period.
The museum and the university released Colonial Japanese Documentaries on Taiwan: Four Films (片格轉動間的台灣顯影) in 2008, another compilation featuring footage from the 1930s.
Photo copied by Liu Wan-chun, Taipei Times
Footage used in All Taiwan was filmed by a team of Japanese hired by the then-Japanese governor-general of Taiwan, museum researcher Chen Yi-hung (陳怡宏) said.
The government held a Miss Taiwan beauty contest and chose Taiwanese songs that were popular at the time, such as Moonlight Sorrow (月夜愁), to be featured in the film, Chen said.
All Taiwan also features an inauguration ceremony of a Shinto shrine in Tainan, while an air-raid drill and a school sports day are the only surviving footage of such events from the Japanese colonial period.
All Taiwan was not made for nostalgic reasons, but rather with the goal of reconnecting with history, museum director Lin Chung-hsi (林崇熙) said.
Hopefully, the film will help people understand how Taiwan was perceived by the Japanese of the time, said Zeng Ji-xian (曾吉賢), an assistant professor at the university’s Graduate Institute of Studies in Documentaries and Film Archiving, who tool part in the recovery process.
Understanding and reinterpreting history would help construct Taiwan’s identity, Zeng said.
All Taiwan is to be screened in Taipei and is available to buy at the museum.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS