A Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmaker and a scholar yesterday slammed producers of a film about the unresolved murders of three members of democracy advocate Lin I-hsiung’s (林義雄) family, after it was discovered that producers had not sought the family’s consent before shooting the film.
The film, named Murder of the Century (世紀血案), is facing calls for a boycott, as producers did not seek Lin’s consent and due to some cast members’ statements at a promotional event.
“These people dance on the bones of the victims on this land as they kowtow to a hostile foreign hegemony,” DPP Legislator Puma Shen (沈伯洋) said in a social media post yesterday. “I spit at them and their arrogance, which lingers on Taiwan’s wounds like a stench.”
Photo courtesy of the Taiwan Peace Foundation
Li Jung-shian (李忠憲), a professor in National Cheng Kung University’s Institute of Computer and Communications Engineering, said in a social media post that Taiwanese are boycotting the movie out of frustration over the lack of justice in the post-White Terror period.
The film’s creators sought no input from Lin’s or other Martial Law era victims’ experiences, raising doubts about its accuracy, Li said.
The filmmakers, by using dubious sources to retell the story, reverse the role of victimhood and attempt to rewrite history without denying it outright, thereby gaining power over the narrative, he said.
Murder of the Century belongs to a common genre of revisionist film comparable to movies shot by descendants of Nazis that paint a sympathetic picture of German soldiers during World War II, he said.
“When an incident of political violence is rewritten into a family drama about personal growth and an abstract fable on human nature, the culpability of the power structure is obscured,” Li said.
“The real issue is not just about a movie, but that there are those who want to decide what history will become before it is written,” he said.
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