Category: Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh 2020

The Shepherds (牧者, Elvis Lu, 2018)

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Among the most liberal of Asian nations, Taiwan became the first to legalise same-sex marriage in 2019 but that doesn’t mean that it’s always easy to be LGBTQ+ particularly if you come from a religious background and wish to maintain your faith. Elvis Lu’s documentary The Shepherds (牧者, Mùzhě) follows a small group of religious leaders who are or have been involved with a progressive church, Tong-Kwang, which was the first in Taiwan to expressly embrace the LGBTQ+ community on its foundation back in 1996. Unfortunately, however, the pastors have faced significant barriers in their personal and professional lives because of their views on homosexuality which face staunch opposition from mainstream religious organisations. The founder of Tong-Kwang Yang Ya-hui, a heterosexual female pastor, eventually took her own life because of the discrimination she later faced within the religious community which made it impossible for her to continue working and support herself without compromising her beliefs. 

Discrimination is also something which has affected pastor Huang Guo-yao and his wife who now work for Tong-Kwang but began their careers in Hong Kong. Huang was forced to give up his ministry after advocating for LGBTQ+ rights brought him into conflict with the more conservative local Churches, eventually making the decision to migrate to Taiwan while his children remained in Hong Kong. He laments that the situation in which he found himself may have had a negative effect on his now grown-up sons, the younger one he worries having become increasingly withdrawn and unwilling to talk about his feelings. 

Zeng Shu-min, meanwhile, is in a similar position unable to find employment with more conventional churches as an openly gay pastor. While officiating at same sex weddings, he’s had to look for other employment to support himself and generally lives an ascetic existence, dependent on the kindness of friends such as Hsiao-en, a lesbian advocate for LGBTQ+ Christians who was herself ejected from the seminary for her liberal views. Running the Light Up project, she provides a more positive religious presence at rallies where conservative voices loudly protest against the advancement of rights for LGBTQ+ people and the movement for marriage equality. Presenting a united front in their priestly outfits, conservative preachers openly commit to undermining the seats of local politicians sympathetic to LGBTQ+ issues, some advancing that they want to “protect” the LGBTQ+ community who must be living “very painfully”, while they refuse to compromise the “basic values” of their society. 

As part of her outreach, Hsaio-en also liaises with the parents of LGBTQ+ children who often find themselves ostracised from their church community solely because of their children’s sexual orientation. Like Shu-min, she also has to work a regular job to support herself while feeling guilty for not being able to devote herself to activism full time and lamenting that hard as she works it often feels as if she isn’t getting anywhere and her efforts don’t make much difference. Yet Tong-Kwang in itself provides a valuable safe place for LGBTQ+ Christians, running a hotline those in distress can call for relief when experiencing difficulty in their personal or religious lives and affirming that their sexuality need not conflict with their faith nor is it a barrier to God’s love. 

With a mixture of observational footage and talking heads interviews, Lu bookends the film with poetic black and white re-enactment featuring the words of pastor Yang Ya-hui taken directly from her autobiography, positioning her as a kind of martyr for the rights of LGBTQ+ people in Taiwan and particularly for LGBTQ+ Christians. The film ends with the passing of the marriage equality act, but is quick to point out that that does not mean that prejudice and discrimination evaporated overnight, Hsiao-en in particular worried that organisations such as hers will come under greater pressure from conservative religious voices intensifying their opposition. Nevertheless, despite the sometimes great toll on their personal lives and those of their families, each of the shepherds remains committed to defending the rights of LGBTQ+ people not only to occupy an equal place within their society but also within their faith as members of a compassionate and progressive religious community. 

The Shepherds streams in the UK 30th October to 5th November courtesy of Queer East and Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

When Love Comes (當愛來的時候, Chang Tso-Chi, 2010)

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“I like the feeling of home” the conflicted heroine of Chang Tso-Chi’s When Love Comes (當愛來的時候, Dāng Ài lái de Shíhou) eventually admits, finally coming to an understanding of her admittedly unusual family even if not, it seems, fully aware of her place within it. A chronicle of displacements, cultural, familial, adolescent, and romantic, When Loves Comes is also in its own way an ode to female solidarity as well as a coming-of-age tale as its feisty young heroine gains the courage to step into herself while preparing for the role of matriarch in accepting her responsibility towards those around her. 

About to turn 16, Laichun (Lee Yi-chieh) is a rebellious teenager who enjoys scandalising her heavily pregnant mother by walking out in skimpy outfits and elaborate makeup. So displaced is she within her own family, that she is not invited to meet her new baby brother at the hospital but is asked to stay home looking after recently arrived uncle Jie (Kao Meng-chieh), her father’s younger brother who has learning difficulties and has come to live with them following the death of his grandmother. Laichun, however, goes out anyway, meeting her as we soon discover no good boyfriend Zongfu (Chris Wu Kang-ren) in a love hotel. Like any teenager, Laichun thinks she’s invincible but she’s also incredibly naive or perhaps merely in denial. By the time she realises she might be pregnant, it’s already too late for an abortion and Zongfu has vanished into thin air. 

“It’s because you’re a girl” a postman with whom Laichun had been engaged in an elaborate flirtation unironically tells her after her impassioned monologue railing against the unfairness of her situation, that Zongfu has vanished while she is blamed for everything, branded a “slut” simply for embracing her sexuality. Her pregnancy places a further strain on her familial relations, though she finds an unexpected ally in her emotionally austere second mother, her father’s first wife Xuefeng (Lu Hsueh-Feng). As we gradually come to understand, Laichun’s father “Dark Face” (Lin Yu-Shun) hailed from rural Kinmen and married into Xuefeng’s family. But Xuefeng was not able to have children of her own so she allowed Dark Face to take a second wife, accepting Laichun’s mother, former gangster Zihua (Ho Tzu-Hua), into their family. 

“I was scared to be responsible for him” Dark Face later admits of his brother, revealing that he left his island home in secret, abandoning Jie to their grandmother who cared for him until the day she died. Dark Face indeed struggles to understand Jie, often frustrated by quirks and frequent meltdowns, cruelly tearing up his drawings somehow incensed as if refusing his brother’s attempt to communicate with the world around him. Jie has been patiently filling a jar with pennies because his grandmother told him to save up for a wife, but like Laichun remains an outsider in the family with only Xuefeng willing to include him. Yet faced with her impending maternity it’s Laichun who eventually becomes his primary carer, patiently taking him to the bank to pay in all his pennies, embracing her responsibility as a member of a family. 

“I like the feeling of being protected”, Laichun had said, “so why is it that I end up looking after everyone else?” only figuring out later that perhaps that’s because they’re sometimes the same thing. Gaining a sense of confidence from her father who reassured her that “you can face whatever comes along” she begins to step into a maternal role, emerging with a new respect for each of her mothers and for the complicated yet functional unit which is her unconventional family. Chang both begins and ends with a birth, taking place on the same spot behind a screen in the family restaurant as the family is first destabilised and then repaired by its new additions. In the opening scene Laichun had been told off for flirting with a man in the family’s restaurant who told her he was unafraid of the “unlucky” table because he worked as a mortician only to get run over on his way out. At the conclusion she meets him again along with his wife who just happened to be the woman who was driving the car that hit him. Not so “unlucky” after all. Life is chaotic and unpredictable, sometimes it presents you with a problem that’s really a solution. “I really very much like the feeling of sunlight” Laichun affirms, no longer so worried about the dark skies, now more assured in herself and her family as she prepares to welcome a new life that anchors her to the old. 

When Love Comes streams in the UK until 27th September as part of the Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Ice Poison (冰毒, Midi Z, 2014)

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“You know only too well that in Burma if we want to make money you either go to work in jade mines, but you can’t afford the trip, or you sell drugs” according to the cynical heroine of Midi Z’s Ice Poison (冰毒, Bīngdú) seducing an equally desperate farmer in an effort free herself from patriarchal oppression and reclaim her son from the family who bought her and refuse to let her go. 

In an ironic touch, the film begins and ends in fire as an unnamed young farmer (Wang Shin-hong) and his father (Zhou Cai Chang) burn their fields and harvest their crop only to lament their slender pickings. This year’s harvest has been poor and, according to the young man “everything is getting more expensive except the vegetables we grow”. Left with few options the old man and his son walk towards the town, calling in at various houses along the way gingerly asking for a loan to help make ends meet but everyone is in a similar position. The men of working age have all gone away to find employment, an older woman explaining that her husband is on a construction site while her son who returned from abroad has only been able to find work on a poppy farm and he won’t be paid until after the harvest is finished. Another woman explains that her son, unlike others, wanted to do things properly by applying for a work visa for Malaysia but was cheated by the broker, who then bribed the police when they reported him. Her son now intends to stay and get married which, perhaps surprisingly, she thinks is irresponsible when there’s no money and his older brother is still a bachelor. The last man relates the sorry tale of his son who was apparently poisoned in Thailand after spurning the advances of two local ladies and has since lost his mind. 

Shifting to his plan B, the old man plans to pawn his cow to borrow a scooter so his son can earn some money with a bike taxi, first asking the scooter’s owner for a loan but once again informed he’s strapped himself because one of his employees ran off and his China deal fell through. Rather than the scooter, he offers the young farmer a job, but they ultimately opt for a bloody bargain, placing the cow as a deposit under the agreement that if they can’t pay back the money for the scooter in a few months’ time the oil merchant may have it slaughtered though it breaks the old man’s heart. 

The young farmer had wanted to go and work in the jade mines, but his father discourages him not just because there’s war in the north but because everyone in the mines takes drugs and if he goes and gets himself hooked on meth where will they be then? The bike taxi business, however, does not exactly take off. The young man finds himself at the back of a crowd of pushier drivers literally blocking the exits of the buses that roll into town mobbing those attempting to disembark, but with such crushing poverty all around him it’s perhaps incongruous to assume many want to spend money on speedy transport. He finally manages to get a passenger, Sanmei (Wu Ke-xi), after realising she is also from the Chinese minority, driving her to a village where, it transpires, her grandfather lies dying, apparently waiting for her arrival and the burying clothes she brings with her from their ancestral home in China. The rites completed, she should go home but Sanmei doesn’t want to. As she tells her mother, she was tricked into a marriage to a much older man whose family are oppressively possessive, unwilling to let her bring her son to meet his grandmother for fear she wouldn’t come back. 

Hinting both at the crushing despair and the patriarchal strictures of their society, Sanmei’s mother tells her that she’s better off in China especially as her husband apparently treats her well enough when there are women who marry for love only to suffer domestic violence. But Sanmei keeps repeating that he’s not the man she loves and so she does not want to stay with him. What she wants is to reclaim her child and live an independent life in Burma where, she feels, there are better opportunities for making money. She’s determined to talk to her shady cousin, ignoring her mother’s advice not to get involved with him because he’s a notorious drug dealer. Her cousin indeed tells her that there’s money to be made for those who are bold in peddling “ice”, apparently the only the remaining marketable commodity. Before long she’s smoking it herself, roping in the young farmer who’s taken to making courier deliveries in the absence of passengers, telling him he’s simply ferrying her around and can claim plausible deniability of what it is she herself is transporting. 

Is Sanmei merely manipulating him, seducing the farmer to claim her new life in exploiting his boredom and despair, or was there perhaps a genuine connection born of mutual hopelessness that their poverty and impotence eventually destroys? Shooting in his own hometown, Midi Z paints a bleak picture of contemporary Burma as a scorched paradise in which the only sense of possibility lies in escape, employment abroad or drug-fuelled oblivion at home. Captured with documentary realism, Ice Poison eventually consumes our two heroes but its ultimate victim is a forgotten and unexpected one, nature dismembered at the hands of cruel and indifferent humanity. 

Ice Poison streams in the UK until 27th September as part of the Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Four Moods (喜怒哀樂, Pai Ching-Jui, King Hu, Li Hsing, Li Han-Hsiang, 1970)

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A key figure in the history of Sinophone cinema, Li Han-Hsiang migrated to Hong Kong from the Mainland in 1948, studying originally as an actor at the Yong Hwa Film Company under the director Zhu Shilun before performing various roles in the industry working as a set painter and graphic artist as well as in voice acting. After his directorial debut Red Bloom in the Snow proved a critical hit, he joined Shaw Brothers in the mid-1950s where he became instrumental in the success of the studio’s hugely popular period musicals inspired by Huangmei opera including the classics The Kingdom And the Beauty (1959) and The Love Eterne (1963). In 1963 he left Shaw Brothers to found Grand Motion Picture Company in Taiwan, helping to further the burgeoning Taiwanese film industry where the Huangmei musicals had proved so popular. Unfortunately, however, the Grand Motion Picture Company ran into financial trouble in the late 1960s and Four Moods (喜怒哀樂, Xǐnù’āilè), a four-part historical portmanteau piece featuring instalments from the most prominent directors of the day including Li himself, was in part intended to improve its flagging fortunes. Unfortunately it was not in that regard successful and Li eventually returned to Hong Kong, founding another production house before rejoining Shaw Brothers in 1972. 

The first of the Four Moods, Joy, is directed by Pai Ching-Jui who studied filmmaking in Italy in the early ‘60s and was heavily influenced by Italian neo-realism but perhaps counterintuitively his contribution is an entirely wordless piece of expressionist psychedelica in which a man trying to stay awake (Yueh Yang) receives a visitation from a beautiful female spirit (Chen Chen) who seems to be the incarnation of a woman whose resting place he repaired after frightening off a disfigured grave robber, planting a pretty flower he found into the earth. The man eventually beds the demure young woman but is disappointed to find her disappeared the next morning, running out into the forest and trying the same thing again, scouring headstones looking for a woman’s name and then planting his flower only to be much less enthused with his next visitor. A visually arresting fever dream of sex and death playing out in a gothic dilapidated cottage in the middle of a foggy forest and set to a primal beat of traditional instrumentation, Pai’s eerie ghost story is feast for the senses. 

King Hu’s Anger, meanwhile, sees the legendary director return to Dragon Inn territory as the destabilising forces of the age meet in a nihilistic battle for survival at remote outpost. The main thrust of the drama follows retainer Tang-hui (Chang Fu-Geng) who is despatched by General Yang to follow one of their men, Tsun, who has been sent into exile after killing the son-in-law of rival general Wang in a fight, but it’s believed that Wang has bribed his guards to kill him before they reach the border. They do indeed try to assassinate Tsun but he seems to fend them off and no longer thinks of them as dangerous when they arrive the inn which turns out to be staffed by duplicitous innkeepers who make a habit of robbing and murdering their guests. Tang-hui, when he turns up, is next on their list because they believe he’s a wealthy businessman weighed down with silver. Soon enough all hell breaks loose as Tang-hui takes on the innkeepers while the mercenary guards debate which side it’s best to be on, culminating in an extraordinarily well choreographed battle set to the rhythms of Peking opera. 

Anger then gives way to Sadness, directed by “godfather of Taiwanese cinema” Li Hsing who migrated from the Mainland in 1949 and began his career in Taiyupian Taiwanese language cinema in 1958 with Brother Liu and Brother Wang on the Road in Taiwan. One again a ghost story, Sadness meditates on the fallacy of vengeance as a man (Ou Wei) returns home after 10 years in prison on a trumped up charge looking for revenge against the men who murdered his family but inconviently discovers that they were all murdered themselves some years previously so there’s no one left to take revenge against. Retaking his family home, he finds a beautiful young woman (Chang Mei-yao) living there who claims to be a refugee making use of the empty house. She tries to talk him out of his revenge fantasies which involve pointlessly desecrating the graves of the Lan family so they’ll never rest in peace, but he doesn’t listen. Thrashing around angrily with his sword, the man eventually softens as he falls for the woman, but ruins his chance of happiness in his inability to let go of his grief and rage. 

The final segment, Happiness, is directed by Li Han-Hsiang himself and is a comparatively subdued tale revolving around a cheerful miller (Ko Hsiang-Ting) who enjoys a drink while fishing in the river by the millhouse. It’s there that he encounters a strange young man (Peter Yang Kwan) who charms the fish into his basket through the beautiful music of his flute. The miller learns that the mysterious man, Liu Lon, is the ghost of one who fell into the river drunk sometime previously and is looking for his replacement so he can move on. Problematically for the miller that involves the death of a young local woman (Chiang Ching) he knows well who considers drowning herself because her father doesn’t approve of her marriage to a man she loves. He saves her, offering to intercede with her father to make him see sense, which means he gets to spend more time with his ghost friend but also that Liu Lon will be in purgatory for another few years. Liu Lon later gets another chance but takes pity on a lost soul and is rewarded for his selfless act of kindness, as he tells the miller will he be for all his earthly goodness. If we haven’t learned already from all the terrible tales of fruitless human greed and violence presented in the other three segments, the path to happiness lies in temperate kindness which is sure to receive at least celestial reward in its proper time. 

Four Moods streams in the UK until 27th September as part of the Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Bride Who Has Returned From Hell (地獄新娘, Hsin Chi, 1965)

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“That place is filled with horror and mystery” a creepily persistent man on a train claiming to be a clairvoyant warns the new governess to a home that does indeed turn out to be tinged with tragedy, though in true gothic melodrama fashion that was something of which she was already well aware. Inspired by the Victoria Holt novel Mistress of Mellyn, Taiyupian The Bride Who Has Returned From Hell (地獄新娘) is less supernatural mystery than eerie romance which sees frustrated desire collide with outdated social mores to destabilise the social order in the otherwise tranquil world of the new elite. 

Echoing the novel’s Cornish atmospherics, the opening title sequence pans over the rugged coastal landscape with its rocky outcrops and crashing waves before homing in on a policeman picking up a handbag while his colleagues investigate the body of a man drowned at sea. Meanwhile, wealthy entrepreneur Yi-Ming (Ko Chun-Hsiung) is worried because his wife Sui-Han is not at home despite the fact they’re supposed to be going to a friend’s birthday party. The man’s body is identified as Guo Jing-Min, Yi-Ming’s cousin and the older brother of the woman living next-door, Feng-Jiao (Liu Ching). Jing-Min and Sui-Han were once lovers, and given that the handbag appears to have been hers, it’s assumed that the pair attempted to elope but got into trouble and drowned with Sui-Han’s body possibly lost at sea. 

Perhaps tellingly, Yi-Ming’s reaction to his wife’s disappearance is irritation and suspicion. He asks the housekeeper if Sui-Han has ever stayed out all night while he’s away from home and on learning that she may have come to harm focuses solely on the embarrassment of being a man whose wife has betrayed him. “How am I supposed to face people?” he angrily asks Feng-Jiao who apologises on her brother’s behalf (but seems equally unperturbed at his demise). He more or less gives up on finding out what’s happened to Sui-Han and begins to reject his daughter, Su-Luan, solely because she reminds him of his wife while taking up with another woman, Mrs Lian (Kuo Yeh-Jen), who married a much older man presumably for his money. 

Meanwhile, Sui-Mi (Chin Mei), Sui-Han’s sister who has recently returned to Taiwan after many years living abroad in Singapore, has secretly taken a job as a governess in the Wang household under an assumed name in order to investigate her sister’s disappearance. The man on the train who warned her about the house’s dark mystery, the lonely little girl, and the man with a bad reputation turns out to be none other than the other brother of Feng-Jiao who lives with her in a neighbouring mansion. Apparently employed partly because of her physical similarity to the (presumed) late Sui-Han in an effort to provide comfort to the highly strung Su-Luan, Sui-Mi is only one of several doubles in play which include the decidedly creepy little girl Lan (Dai Pei-shan), the housekeeper’s granddaughter, who insists that Sui-Han is still alive while more or less spying on everyone making full use of her invisibility as a member of the servant class. 

Like any heroine of a gothic romance, Sui-Mi’s role is not just to solve the mystery but to restore order by unifying the various forces of destabilisation currently threatening the Wang family which is one reason we see her actively include Lan, treating her the same as she does Su-Luan, teaching the two girls to be friends and equals as she educates them both together. The other threat to social harmony is in Yi-Ming’s moodiness and womanising, most particularly his possibly immoral relationship with Mrs. Lian and inability to embrace his role as a father by showing love to his daughter who is already becoming strange and neurotic in the wake of her mother’s death, believing that she has been abandoned by both parents. Thus, partly thanks to her physical similarity to Sui-Han as her sister, Sui-Mi assumes the maternal role assuring Su-Luan that she will love her forever in her mother’s place while Yi-Ming’s growing attraction to her precisely because of these maternal qualities, in its own way also problematic, draws him back towards the proper path of home and family. 

Pursued by Feng-Jiao’s creepy brother and conflicted in her attraction to her brother-in-law while still harbouring the suspicion he may be involved in her sister’s disappearance, Sui-Mi finds herself drifting away from the idea of solving the mystery even while inhabiting the creepy mansion which is in its own way both literally and figuratively haunted. A dream apparition of her sister in an ethereal use of double exposure effectively gives her permission to pursue her romantic destiny by instructing her to stay in Taiwan and look after Su-Luan because, she fears, no one else will which doesn’t speak highly of Yi-Ming, while reminding Sui-Mi that she came to the Wangs’ for a reason.  

“You can’t get true love by manipulation” the villain is later told, revealing to us that the motive in this case really was romantic jealousy, a typically gothic sense of repression born of oppressive patriarchal social codes which prevent the proper expression of desire and eventually lead to violence. Sui-Mi restores order by solving the mystery and then healing the rifts by, ironically, submitting herself to those same oppressive social codes in assuming her “natural” role as wife and mother. Using a series of unexpected music cues from ominous Japanese folksong Moon over Ruined Castle as Sui-Mi surveys the rugged mansion to the more upbeat Hana as she plays with the children, moody jazz, Danny Boy, and even the James Bond theme playing over the climax (not to mention the many instances of child star and producer’s daughter Dai Pei-shan singing her gloomy lullaby), Hsin goes all in on the gothic imagery even having Sui-Mi almost fall victim to a suspicious rock fall just as she becomes a credible romantic heroine, before ending on a cheerful note with another song celebrating the simple joys of the traditional family.

The Bride Who Has Returned From Hell streams in the UK until 27th September as part of the Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh.

Restoration trailer (English subtitles)

A City Called Dragon (龍城十日, Tu Chun-Hsun, 1970)

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“A young girl like you has to be careful” a well-meaning palanquin driver warns our heroine, little knowing that into the heart of danger is exactly where she means to go. Tu Chun-Hsun’s Taiwanese wuxia A City Called Dragon (龍城十日, Lóngchéng Shí Rì) stars relative newcomer Hsu Feng immediately before her breakout role in King Hu’s A Touch of Zen as a noble Han Chinese revolutionary resisting Manchu oppression in the Song Dynasty bravely venturing into Dragon City currently in lockdown under the increasingly paranoid rule of its new magistrate, Lord Pu (Shih Chun). 

In 1131, “Jade Dragonfly” Shang Yen-Chih (Hsu Feng) leaves the mountain stronghold for Dragon City in order to rendezvous with Chen, a fellow revolutionary in possession of a plan book essential for the coming battle against the oppressive Manchu regime. As the palanquin drivers inform her, however, Chen, along with 80 members of his family, was executed for treason two days previously on orders of the new governor. The city is in a state of paranoid chaos that leaves the drivers unwilling to approach. Nevertheless, Yen-Chih is undaunted knowing she must get her hands on the book before it falls into the hands of the authorities. 

Tu conjures a world of tension and intrigue perfectly capturing the anxieties of Yen-chih’s undercover existence, painfully aware of each and every sound and always on the look out for trouble or betrayal as she wanders the paranoid city. Shortly before she arrives, a group of local men is brought in for questioning on the mere suspicion of visiting Chen’s grave, tainted by association and sent off to be tortured, bearing out the bearers’ assertion that Pu is a dangerously paranoid authoritarian intent on stamping out any and all dissent. If there’s a parallel to the White Terror here is it in implication only, but it’s presence is perhaps felt in the innate dangers of the world in which Yen-Chih now finds herself. In any case, she is perhaps in some instances protected by her appearance, written off as a genteel young woman in need of protection rather than a fearsome revolutionary able to leap tall walls in a single bound and endure days of torture never wavering in her mission. 

Meanwhile, Pu’s Manchu guards are universally corrupt. Yen-Chih makes a nervous entry into the city alarmed by a sudden cry of “freeze” only to realise the soldiers haven’t even noticed her, they are too busy gambling. Later they make a point of carting off her collaborator, tipped off by an obsequious informant hoping for advancement, and then ransacking his pharmacy, burning all his goods in the central square (which considering what they are might not be the best move), careful to pocket any valuables first. In such an atmosphere, perhaps it’s not surprising that Yen-Chih succeeds in finding unexpected allies, radicalising a young thief brought in, ironically, on suspicion of killing a spy she herself killed while they are both in prison. 

The Manchu regime and most particularly Pu’s deputy are indeed corrupt and oppressive, but as expected not quite everything is as we first assumed it to be. The ground constantly shifting beneath her feet, Yen-Chih chases the book but eventually discovers that she has been under a misapprehension as to its keepers and not only that, she’s also in the middle of someone else’s complicated revenge plot. The resolution though not exactly unexpected paves the way towards a surprisingly empathetic finale in which Yen-Chih is moved to discover the the extent to which a comrade has undertaken their duty, protecting her in facilitating her mission and allowing her to return to their shared cause with new hope while they remain behind alone in the increasingly destabilised environment of Dragon City the forces of Manchu for the moment seemingly turned against themselves. 

Breathtakingly tense, Tu’s anxious, low angle camera captures the sense of a city locked down by fear and paranoia while lending a ghostly air to the abandoned Chen estate where Yen-chih encounters its creepy butler before an intense showdown with Pu’s guards once again tipped off by their duplicitous informant. Boasting an extremely accomplished and charismatic performance from Hsu Feng as the intense swordswoman revolutionary and genuinely exciting choreography, A City Called Dragon is a forgotten gem of the ’70s Taiwanese wuxia boom.

A City Called Dragon streams in the UK 21st to 27th September as part of the Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Kuei-Mei, a Woman (我這樣過了一生, Chang Yi, 1985)

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“Why are women always being tolerant?” a middle-aged, unmarried daughter asks her mother uncertain why she stoically put up with everything she did as if she had any other choice. As the title implies, Chang Yi’s Kuei-Mei, a Woman (我這樣過了一生, Wǒ Zhèyàng Guò le Yīshēng) , based on a book by his then wife Hsiao Sa, is the story of one ordinary woman though one who perhaps stands in for that of her nation undergoing a period of rapid change from post-war penury to comfortable prosperity in a little more than 30 years which is in essence a generation. 

Kuei-Mei (Loretta Yang Hui-shan) leaves Mainland China during the chaos of the civil war and escapes to Taiwan with her cousin. Living in limbo, neither of them intended to stay very long and assumed they’d one day be going home. Nevertheless, there are things which must be done, which is why Kuei-Mei finds herself gravitating towards an arranged marriage with a widowed father of three, Hou (Lee Li-chun), another Mainland refugee with a steady job as a waiter in a restaurant run by a foreigner. For lack of other options, Kuei-Mei decides to become Hou’s wife, but unbeknownst to her, he has a serious gambling problem that continually endangers their family and eventually loses him his job. Shackled to an irresponsible man, it’s Kuei-Mei who has to shoulder the responsibility of trying to keep the family together but in the end she can save it only by breaking it apart, accepting a job as a housekeeper to a wealthy couple who are moving to Japan taking with her only two of her five children, one of the twins she bore herself and Hou’s oldest boy who struggles in the Taiwanese educational system. 

As a middle-aged, modern woman, Cheng-fang, Hou’s oldest daughter, asks her step-mother why she chose to forgive her father, returning after having left him on discovering that he had fathered a child with another woman. Kuei-Mei doesn’t have much of an answer for her, we can infer she returned because the children needed her and she couldn’t support them alone, but wonders if her unhappy marriage is the reason Cheng-fang has remained single. Contemporary women have other options, they need not stoically resign themselves to passive suffering as the women of Kuei-Mei’s generation were expected to do. None of the marriages we see are particularly happy, from that of Kuei-Mei’s cousin and her husband whose constant arguing pushes her towards a marriage of her own to escape the awkwardness of being a guest in their home, to the wealthy Weis in Japan who again argue constantly because, the servants gossip, of a patriarchal power imbalance. Mr. Wei is dependent on his wife’s family for influence and advancement, but humiliates her through his infidelity while she feels trapped, fearing the humiliation of middle-aged divorce may be even worse. Again it’s a desire to escape the awkwardness of the Weis, along with the “humiliation” of living as mistreated servant, that motivates Kuei-Mei to leave their employ to work illegally in a restaurant in the hope of earning higher wages in order to return home and open a restaurant of her own. 

Kuei-Mei’s determination is in a sense to be her own boss, though the level of autonomous independence she can achieve is perhaps limited by the patriarchal society in which she lives. Nevertheless, she works hard to achieve it despite being tied to the dead weight that is Hou who can only drift along behind her, waiting tables in the restaurant she eventually sets up which is named after a street in the Shanghai she left as little more than a teenager. As an old woman she receives a letter from the man she was engaged to in her village, a sudden reminder of the life she could have had, all her youthful dreams of romance sacrificed on the altar of pragmatism in her marriage to Hou. But despite all the difficulty she remains surrounded by the family she secured through her maternity, even if the grown-up children all dream of lives abroad, scattered by the glittering prizes of a newly prosperous era. 

Late in life walking with Cheng-fang, Kuei-Mei passes the place where her twins were born, an elegant tower block replacing the tenement where she first lived with her cousin after arriving in Taipei. Her rise mirrors that of her country, patiently working hard to make something of herself in turbulent times, unrecognised by the world around her, but emerging with quiet dignity in her ability to bear her sorrow with grace as she determined to build a better future for her children. Her life has, however, been hard and its costs are visited directly upon her at its end, the ills of the modern society ironically symbolised in a cancer of the womb in a woman whose triumph lies in her maternity. A social realist epic filmed with a studied detachment, Chang’s hugely empathetic biopic of the everywoman has only a profound respect for stoic suffering while quietly resentful of the society which demanded it.

Kuei-Mei, a Woman streams in the UK 18th to 27th September as part of the Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Where the Seagull Flies (海鷗飛處, Li Hsing, 1974)

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Regarded as the “father of Taiwanese cinema”, Li Hsing was one of many who migrated from the Mainland during the Chinese civil war in 1949. Originally working as an actor, Li shifted into directing with the boom in Taiyupian Taiwanese language cinema in late ‘50s though he himself did not speak it, moving then into documentaries and finally self-financing the Mandarin language indie film Our Neighbors in 1963 becoming known for a particular brand of “healthy realism”. Despite this, however, the later part of the decade saw him enter into a long association with publishing phenomenon and romance writer Chiung Yao for a series of mainstream melodramas starring popular idols of the day. 

Chiung Yao’s novels are known for their depiction of relationships which are often in some way taboo as in Outside the Window the film adaptation of which launched the career of Brigitte Lin as a schoolgirl in love with her teacher. Li’s adaptation of Where the Seagull Flies (海鷗飛處, Hǎi’ōu Fēi Chǔ) by contrast erects barriers between the two lovers which are largely psychological as they struggle to overcome their pride, stubbornness, and fear of intimacy to embrace their love but also ambivalently engages with the changing nature of patriarchal society at once insisting its feisty heroine be softened in order to become a “good wife” while allowing her the agency her society denies her only by going abroad. 

The hero, technically, is melancholy journalist Muhuai (Alan Tang Kwong-Wing) who encounters the heroine Yushang (Chen Chen) for the first time on a boat in Hong Kong where he saves her from committing suicide she later tells him, giving her name as “Seagull”, because she has just murdered her cheating husband by hitting him over the head with a wine bottle. Seagull disappears on him just as he’s trying to get through to the mistress to get her to check if the husband is really dead but he meets her again in Singapore where she gives her name as Ye Xin. Working as a nightclub singer she agrees to show him around the island, telling him that she’s originally from Manila and is supporting a troubled family. This time she doesn’t disappear but arrives too late to see off his plane at the airport. Disappointed that all his letters come back no such address, Muhuai is despondent and then extremely confused to meet the mysterious woman yet again as Yushang, a uni friend of his younger sister Mufeng (Tang Mei-Fang). 

Figuring out that all three women really are one and that Yushang is her “true” identity, Muhuai is extremely annoyed and decides to have his revenge by dating her until she falls in love with him and then ringing her to come out at 3am to tell her he was just having a bit of fun and never really loved her at all. The cause of all the drama is, at root, Muhuai’s male pride in that he resents being “deceived” by Yushang on their first two meetings during which she was essentially engaging in reckless role play as a break from her “boring” existence as a member of the new super rich elite (she can travel so freely because her father is a wealthy businessman who operates all over the world). Yushang, meanwhile, is being pushed towards an arranged marriage with her father’s business associate Shiche (Patrick Tse Yin) while attending college and falling in love with Muhuai. Each feeling spurned, their romance eventually turns dark with Yushang rebound marrying Shiche who turns out to be an abusive gold-digger. 

The barrier between herself and Muhuai then seems insurmountable. Believing she’s made her bed, Yushang quells her fiery, independent nature to conform to the image of the “good wife”, later literally beaten into submission by the cruel and manipulative Shiche. While it could be said that she’s being punished for her betrayal of love, it’s patriarchal social codes which eventually leave her trapped. Though her outwardly conventional mother had always been on her side, cautioning her to follow her heart rather than marry Shiche out of prideful self-destruction, she too thinks that her daughter should “be more like a woman, not a child. Feminine and tender”. When Yushang goes to her parents to suggest a divorce they reject the idea out of hand, refusing to believe that Shiche is really abusive, assuming that she is simply failing to adapt to married life in a refusal to accept her husband’s authority and is possibly realising she made a mistake while continuing to think of Muhuai. Yushang’s father eventually signals he may support her desire for a divorce if the marriage is unsalvageable but not if she’s merely leaving her husband for another man. 

Muhuai meanwhile has sunk into a depression, drowning his sorrows in drink and consumed by his sense of romantic impotence in having failed to fight for love while intensely resenting Yushang for making him feel this way. The barrier he has to overcome is male pride, getting over the literal inauthenticity of his relationships with the first two incarnations to realise that Yushang really is the one he loves no matter who else she might have been at various times in her life including Shiche’s wife. While the multi-country setting perhaps reflects a new globalising Taiwan as well as a rise in economic prosperity, Yushang’s globetrotting exploits are also an attempt to escape the patriarchal constrains of contemporary Taiwanese society, her “boring” life of continual ease and emotional emptiness where everyone is forever telling her that she has to be less, quieter, and above all obedient most particularly to men. 

Even so, the film too uncomfortably insists that Yushang’s feisty independence is “childish” and unfeminine while implying that her abusive relationship with Shiche turns her into a real woman capable of fulfilling her natural role as a housewife. Only by going abroad can she finally free herself of his control, and largely because he simply gets a better offer chasing an American oil heiress. It’s a minor irony that while Yushang’s problem is apparently her manly impulsivity both of her suitors are examples of male failure, Shiche in his laziness as a man who only wants to live off a rich woman rather than support himself, and Muhuai in his romantic diffidence too insecure to admit his love for Yushang. Nevertheless, Chiung Yao and Li Hsing are careful to leave the door open for love, refusing the possibility that it’s ever too late to fulfil one’s romantic destiny as the lovers each concede a movement towards the centre in finally finding the courage to open themselves to emotional authenticity. 

Where the Seagull Flies streams in the UK 21st to 27th September as part of the Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh.

Trailer (English/Traditional Chinese subtitles)

The Husband’s Secret (丈夫的秘密, Lin Tuan-Chiu, 1960)

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Emotional pain flows out of wronged love, according to the gently judgemental voiceover cutting in at random moments throughout Lin Tuan-Chiu’s familial melodrama The Husband’s Secret (丈夫的秘密). A tale of changing gender roles and a conservative society, Lin’s film finds a frustrated female solidarity but also insists on the repair of the traditional family even when that family may not take the form one expects or in fact be entirely healthy while romantic love which destabilises the social order must be suppressed in order to preserve the maternal which only reinforces it. 

The film opens with Tshiu-Bi (Wu Li-Fen) meeting some of her old friends from college at a reunion only to be accidentally shamed by another woman boasting about her already large family. Despite being apparently happily married to rising executive Siu-Gi (Chang Pan-Yang) and living a financially comfortable life in a large Western-style home with a live-in maid, there is discord in the marriage because the couple have no children. A moment of crisis presents itself when Tshiu-Bi runs into her old friend Le-Hun (Chang Mei-Yao) who had been missing from the reunion and learns that the reason for her absence was shame. Seduced and betrayed, Le-Hun is now a single mother living in desperate poverty, forced to pawn her coat in the middle of winter and pound the streets amid the falling snow looking for work. She is always turned away, prospective employers complaining that she looks like a drug addict because of her shivering in the cold, sunken cheeks, and hollow expression. When her young song Ah-Siong is ill and she needs money for hospital treatment, she is forced to swallow her pride and ask Tshiu-Bi for help. Tshiu-Bi gives her a diamond ring to pawn, bringing her into conflict with her husband who is stunned to hear the name and realise that Le-Hun maybe the girlfriend he broke up with to agree to an arranged marriage with Tshiu-Bi to further his business prospects. 

Tshiu-Bi of course knows nothing of this, bringing Le-Hun to stay with them after she is found passed out in the street and hurt when she abruptly leaves after realising that Siu-Gi and her old friend are now a married couple. As Siu-Gi later acknowledges, much of this is all his fault in the moral cowardice that saw him abandon a woman he loved to make an advantageous match. He may have tried to be a good husband and is not a bad man, but he has perhaps behaved badly and the consequences of his bad behaviour are visited on the women in his life alone. Siu-Gi wants to make amends, but is also overwhelmed by old emotions. Perhaps he envisages a solution in which he could have it all, protect Le-Hun and the son he suspects may be his while maintaining his married life and his wife none the wiser. 

Unlike Tshiu-Bi, Le-Hun has certainly been unlucky, ruined by an early failed affair with a bad man who turned out to be a petty criminal and forced her to become a bar hostess to support him. She left Sing-Liat after discovering him with another woman, but he continues to pursue her, damaging her earlier relationship with Siu-Gi and disrupting every opportunity she takes to make a life for herself, seemingly never allowed to forget that she is a “fallen woman” as if haunted by her transgression. Le-Hun is even evicted from her flat when the landlady’s drunken husband tries it on while she is half-conscious with fever, the landlady choosing to blame her rather than the husband in a theme which will be repeated when the prior relationship between Le-Hun and Siu-Gi eventually comes to light. Tshiu-Bi’s uncle, who had arranged the marriage, reminds her that boys will be boys and having a mistress is perfectly normal, keen that she not cause further scandal with a divorce over something as trivial as a husband’s infidelity. Running into Le-Hun by chance after she had fled to another town, Siu-Gi gives in to his passion and spends the night with her, justifying himself that what they have done is perfectly natural while the judgemental voiceover cuts in to ask how educated people could behave in such an uncivilised manner. 

As a result of their night of passion, Le-Hun becomes pregnant and finds refuge with a close friend and fellow bar girl who helps her to raise Ah-Siong, but once the pregnancy is discovered the uncle reassumes control and lays claim to the baby. He orders Le-Hun never to see Siu-Gi again, to which she agrees already overcome with guilt in having betrayed her friend by sleeping with her husband, but also makes the completely unreasonable demand that he will take the baby away after it’s born, apparently intending to put it out for adoption. Tshiu-Bi, meanwhile, sees he obvious solution and wants to keep the child as her own which angers the fiercely patriarchal uncle because it would mean that the mistress’ son inherits the estate (Siu-Gi had married into their family which is why he has a different surname to the one he used when he was with Le-Hun, perhaps explaining his feelings of resentment and emasculation in the reversed power balance of his marriage). 

Yet the illicit affair provides a point both of fracture and of healing which turns the single point of crisis into two definitively separate yet viable branches. While the relationship between Le-Hun and her friend seems perhaps transgressively close and hints at an alternative family born of female solidarity of the kind that Tshiu-Bi tried to offer to Le-Hun but was frustrated by romantic crisis, Le-Hun is eventually forced to reunite with her no-good gangster boyfriend who has apparently reformed after a spot in jail and now bitterly regrets his treatment of her. Wayward men are brought back into superficial conformity in being forced to assume a degree of responsibility as husbands and fathers, while women are expected to suppress their emotions and stoically endure the consequences of male failure. Nevertheless, even while Le-Hun’s friend is seemingly left out in the cold, the social order is preserved in the repair of two “happy” families cauterising the wound of transgression through the reinforcement of the conservative.

The Husband’s Secret streams in the UK 18th to 27th September as part of the Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh.

Clip (English / Traditional Chinese subtitles)

Restoration trailer (English / Traditional Chinese subtitles)

Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh Announces Lineup for First Ever Online Edition

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Originally scheduled to take place in physical form for the very first time this year, the Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh has reconfigured itself as an online event showcasing a host of underseen classics from throughout the island’s cinematic history.

Taiwanese Hokkien-Language Cinema 

The Husband’s Secret (1960), dir. Lin Tuan-Chiu

A happily married woman tries to help a school friend who has fallen on hard times after becoming a single mother, but the situation is complicated when it turns out the father of her friend’s baby is actually her husband…

Six Suspects (1965), dir. Lin Tuan-Chiu

Stylishly shot noirish pro-police crime movie in which a blackmailer is offed leaving a series of suspects all annoyed by him because of his capacity to expose their dodgy dealings in the increasingly amoral post-war economy. Review.

The Bride Who Has Returned From Hell (1965), dir. Hsin Chi

Gothic mystery based on Mistress of Mellyn in which an entrepreneur believes that his wife has drowned after trying to elope with another man whose body was found after a boating accident along with a woman’s purse while she remains absent…

A Borrowed Hong Kong, the Imagined China in Taiwan, and Trans-regional Cinema 

A City Called Dragon (1970), dir. Tu Chun-Hsun

Sumptuous Taiwanese wuxia starring A Touch of Zen’s Hsu Feng as a revolutionary who ventures to the capital to meet up with a comrade and retrieve a secret map, only she later learns that he along with his whole family has already been executed…

Four Moods (1970), dir. Li Han-Hsiang, Pai Ching-Jui, Li Hsing, King Hu

Four-part portmanteau movie featuring folklore-themed contributions from Li Han-Hsiang, Pai Ching-Jui, Li Hsing, and King Hu.

Melodrama Divas

Where the Seagull Flies (1974), dir. Li Hsing 

A Taiwanese journalist encounters three identical young women but they each disappear right after he falls in love with them. In Hong Kong she is a woman attempting suicide after killing her husband, in Singapore a Filipina bar hostess, and in Taipei his younger sister’s uni friend. After discovering her identity and that she likes to play tricks on men, he plots his revenge…

Cheerful Wind (1981), dir. Hou Hsiao-Hsien

Early idol drama from Hou Hsiao-Hsien starring Fong Feifei as an independent young woman working in advertising who falls for Kenny Bee’s blind musician. Review.

Taiwan New Cinema and Its Legacy

The Sandwich Man (1983), dir. Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tseng Chuang-Hsiang, Wan Jen

Tripartite portmanteau film inspired by the short stories of Huang Chun-Ming and exploring the changes in Cold War Taiwanese society. Features contributions by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tseng Chuang-Hsiang, and Wan Jen.

Kuei-Mei, a Woman (1985), dir. Chang Yi 

Melodrama inspired by the Xiao-Sa novel in which the heroine, Kuei-Mei escapes the Mainland for Taiwan to live with her cousin but is married off to a widowed Chinese refugee who already has three children and a massive gambling addiction leaving her with no choice other than to seek a better life in Japan.

When Love Comes (2010), dir. Chang Tso-Chi

A young woman living with her two mothers, father, uncle, and grandfather comes to understand more about her family when she is abandoned by her boyfriend after becoming pregnant.

God Man Dog (2007), dir. Chen Singing 

A hand model suffering from post-natal depression, a bereaved indigenous couple, their daughter in the city, and a one-legged man driving a giant Buddha bus, are brought together by a stray dog. Review.

Midi Z Selection

Jade Miners (2015), dir. Midi Z

Midi Z’s first documentary focusses on the jade miners continuing to work against the back drop of the continuing conflict with the Kachin Independence Organization which had brought the industry to a halt.

Ice Poison (2014), dir. Midi Z

When economic forces render his farm unviable, an old man sells his cow to buy a motorcycle for his son so he can make money taking people into town but he ends up becoming involved in drug trafficking to help a woman trying to bring her child back to Myanmar after being tricked into marriage in China.

The Palace on the Sea (2014), dir. Midi Z

Experimental short in which a Buddhist monk tries to free the ghost of a woman from a floating restaurant.

Docs: Exploring Diversity in Pursuing the Taiwanese Identity 

How Deep is the Ocean (2000), dir. Tang Hsiang-Chu

Documentary following a young man from the Tao indigenous minority who returns home to Orchid island after pursuing a better life on the Mainland.

Out/Marriage (2012), dir. Nguyen Kim-Hong

Documentary following a Vietnamese woman who came to Taiwan to marry but endured years of domestic abuse before escaping and becoming a single-mother to her son.

The Mountain (2015), dir. Su Hung-En 

Documentary following the director’s grandfather, Teymu Teylong, a hunter from an indigenous community.

The Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh will take place online from 18th to 27th September with all films streaming for free! Full details are available via the official website and you can also keep up with the festival via the official Facebook Page and Twitter account.