Fri, Jan 29, 2021 page2

• Student film about Dafen Incident wins top prize

  • By Hung Chen-hung and Jonathan Chin / Staff reporter, with staff writer
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  A student film on the Dafen Incident on Tuesday won the top prize at the Ministry of Education’s Aboriginal film festival.

  Made by students at I-Shou University, War of the Moon (月戰) won the grand prize at the seventh Mata Awards, the ministry said.

  Director Huang Hsiao-ching (黃孝擎), a university student of Bunun descent, said he decided to make the film after fellow Bunun students proposed shooting a movie on the Bunun historical experience during a short-film class.

  

  Hu Chia-yu, second right, director of the documentary Sino nagran mo? and members of the production team pose at a location on Orchid Island in an undated photograph.

  Photo courtesy of I-Shou University

  The Dafen Incident refers to an uprising of the Bunun against Japanese rule, after a colonial constabulary attempted to confiscate their hunting arms in 1915. The rebellion lasted 18 years.

  The film attempts to reconstruct the events of the Dafen Incident, which loom large in the Bunun collective memory, despite a historical record that is riddled with gaps, he said.

  The Bunun language is utilized throughout the film and the cast received training on speaking their lines from Bunun and Japanese students at the university, Huang said.

  

  Bunun fight with Japanese in a scene from the college student film War of the Moon about the Dafen Incident, which won top prize at the Ministry of Education’s Aboriginal film festival.

  Photo courtesy of I-Shou University

  Twenty-four classmates of Bunun, Paiwan, Amis and Rukai descent assisted in making the film, he said.

  In Bunun tradition, the new moon signifies a time for exterminating pests and weeds from their fields, and the film’s title is a tribute to their ancestor’s struggle to overcome the Japanese colonizers, he said.

  Meanwhile, a documentary looking at the fading Aboriginal cultural landscape of Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) won the Mata Award’s third prize.

  Sino nagran mo? (低鳴) is a record of the changes that occurred to the island’s scenic locations and place names that reflect the gradual loss of their original meaning, director and I-Shou University alumnus Hu Chia-yu (胡佳宇) said.

  The film relies heavily on interviews with elders and residents in an attempt to restore the Aboriginal cultural context of Lanyu, Hu said.

  Meanwhile, the Council of Indigenous Peoples on Monday published new editions of 10 history books on Aboriginal resistance to Japanese colonial rule that the agency commissioned from 2005 to 2019.

  The authors of the books, well-received in their first printings, were given the opportunity to amend and update their works before the reprint, the council said.

  Establishing an Aboriginal perspective in national history is important to achieve transitional and historical justice, Council of Indigenous Peoples Minister Icyang Parod said.

  The books seek to re-evaluate the causes and effects of historical events from an Aboriginal point of view, Icyang said.

  Copies of the new editions have been given to the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Cultural Affairs in hopes that they would incorporate the works in the writing and teaching of the nation’s history, he said.
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