Category: Taiwan

Autumn Tempest (落山風, Huang Yu-Shan, 1988)

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When the autumn tempest comes, it can launch a buffalo into the air, according to a middle-aged woman working at a remote mountain temple. Wen-Hsiang (Yang Ching-huang) is in the spring of his life, but the tempest is coming for him too as he finds himself consumed by the desires he’s supposed to be shaking off after becoming fixated on a lonely, young-ish novice at the temple in flight from a failed marriage.

Su-pi’s (Kang Soo-yeon) decision to become a nun is reflective of the repressive patriarchal social codes under which she was living. We’re told that she’s essentially been rejected because she was unable to produce a male heir. Her husband has since got his mistress pregnant, or so he thinks, and the mother-in-law, who is really the one in charge, has decided to move her in, telling Su-pi she can like it or lump it. Unsurprisingly, Su-pi chose to leave but the temple hasn’t really accepted her either. Su-pi wants to shave her head and be admitted as a nun, but the abbess says she’s not ready. 

Su-pi does indeed have lingering attachments to this world and they seem to lead in two directions, firstly her unfilled and at the time taboo sexual desires, and her resentment towards her husband couple with the sense of righteous anger over her unfair dismissal. This desire to be desired is what draws her to Wen-Hsiang who is probably not all that much younger than her but is also a “kid” too young to know anything of real love. She asks him if she’s still young and pretty and if he loves her to which Wen-Hsiang readily agrees though it’s more that he becomes obsessed with her, drunk on his desire and his own need to be needed.

Wen-Hsiang’s parents’ marriage collapsed some years previously though they’ve never divorced because of the social stigma and now Wen-Hsiang’s mother has taken his sister to the US leaving him behind. Not getting along with his father, his doting grandmother sends him to the temple to help him study so he can fulfil his familial obligations, get into medical school, and follow in his father’s footsteps. No one seems to want Wen-Hsiang, not even the old girlfriend who wouldn’t stop calling when he first went to the temple but has since moved on. But even on decamping to the mountains, Wen-Hsiang can’t leave the city behind. He packs a series of coffee-related accoutrements as well as tapes of Western and Japanese pop music he listens to while he studies. When he finds the Buddha’s eyes intrusive, he simply throws his jacket over them.

But the transgressive sexual relationship they enter into also nearly kills the abbess who is struck down by some kind of psychic force that seems to emanate from it. Though the couple think they’ve kept it quiet, everyone appears to know, the abbess warning Su-pi that young men are impulsive, like bulls who can’t be tamed, and should be avoided. Struck by the weight of this spiritual transgression, Su-pi tries to end it but is both drawn by her own desire and by Wen-Hsiang’s obsession. The realisation that she is pregnant forces her hand, though we might also wonder if in the end her greatest desire was always for revenge or just to avenge herself by forcing her husband to realise the fault lies with him. She is fully capable of fulfilling the role society has forced on her though she may also reject it symbolically by becoming a nun while fulfilling her own desires by telling her husband where to go when he comes crawling back.

Though the film sets out to punish Wen-Hsiang for his transgressions, it cannot help but implicate Su-pi for his downfall, implying it’s is her fault rather than resolutely his own in his inability to overcome his desires. She meanwhile is equally punished by the film’s ambiguous ending in which she may have to live with the unintended consequences of embracing her sexuality as opposed to abandoning it by joining the temple. Even so, there’s something so classical about her features that they almost resemble the face of Buddha, not unlike that Wen-Hsiang’s grandmother prays to in the hope he’ll get into medical school. Huang frequently uses natural imagery to express the tumultuous emotions of the pair of lovers in contrast to the ordered and tranquil environment of the temple but also perhaps suggests that not even here can they really free themselves of the authoritarian oppressions of the city.

Autumn Tempest screened as part of the BFI’s Myriad Voices: Reframing Taiwan New Cinema.

Out of the Blue (小爸爸的天空, Chen Kun-Hou, 1984)

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A young man begins to dream after discovering he has become a father in Chen Kun-Hou’s poignant coming of age drama Out of the Blue (小爸爸的天空, xiǎo bàba de tiānkōng). Though it could perhaps be argued that the heroine suffers unduly, the film is remarkably unjudgemental about unplanned teenage pregnancy and at heart is rooting for the young couple. But the real world is not so kind, and it seems impossible that their love could survive in the liberalising but still oppressive late martial law society.

Long is a boy from an ordinary family with a crush on a wealthy young who goes to his school, Mi. Mi gets picked up by a chauffeured car every day, while Long watches her afar from his bicycle. Eventually, the pair get together and bond over their shared sense of dissatisfaction with their families by whom they are each trapped in opposing ways. Long complains that his former policeman father beats and berates him for not living up to his expectations, while Mi alternately implies her parents don’t really care about her because they’re always working and let her do as she pleases, and that she has no free will because she’s duty-bound by the expectations of filiality.

Perhaps bearing this out, Mi rarely speaks during her courtship with Long and only later is able to talk plainly to her mother, though her mother doesn’t listen. When she becomes pregnant after sleeping with Long when he stays out all night after a beating from his father, Mi can’t bring herself to tell anyone but stays at home alone while her parents head to LA. For unstated reasons, she can’t bring herself to tell Long, either. She ignores his calls and drops out of school, instructing the servants not to answer the phone when he calls. But when her mother finally finds out, she’s unexpectedly supportive. At least, she doesn’t disown her, force her to give up the child, to marry someone else or to stop seeing Long (though she does so anyway), all of which adds an additional layer to Mi’s sense of filial obligation feeling as if she cannot disobey her mother because she has been so kind and understanding of her “scandalous” behaviour.

When Mi abruptly disappears and he’s told she’s gone abroad, Long tries to talk to his father but in the end he doesn’t say anything. He simply refills his father’s ink pot while he continues to practice calligraphy. The only really time that Long’s father actually speaks to him is on hearing that he’s got the grades to get into his chosen university. It’s at this point that his father considers him “a man,” having his first drink with him and treating him as an adult rather than a naughty boy he can beat with a belt. In a sense, Long has conformed with his father’s authoritarianism in following the conventional path and is no longer trying to resist it, but on being unexpectedly reunited with his own son, Weiwei, is a more compassionate and empathetic presence, in love with the idea of having a family, though it is currently out of his reach. When he runs into Mi and realises the toddler she’s got in a pushchair is his, he’s still a student financially unable to support a wife and child let alone keep them in comfort.

As such, Long might be the unexpectedly good man who would have married and taken care of Mi if he knew but as they each say several times, everything’s different now. After their separation, both describe themselves as having grown up. Though he didn’t know he had become a father, Long feels as if he’s now older than his friends. He’s no longer interested in playing pool with them and is bored by their teenage pastimes. It’s ironically this sense of growing up that sets him on a more conventional path by knuckling down to study. But Mi perhaps feels trapped. Her parents have accepted her, but they have also more or less adopted Weiwei as their own and refuse to see her as a grown woman. When she tries to stand up to her mother about going to LA, her mother refuses to allow her to stay behind with Weiwei because she doesn’t believe she can look after herself let alone a child. Mi snaps back that could marry Long, but her mother doesn’t take it seriously. In the end, Mi is unable to break free of her filial obligations and defy her mother by leaving to make a new family with Long.

Mi’s mother stands in the way of progress, though she is in other ways a good and compassionate person who never tries to punish her daughter for her sexual transgression and only wanted to care for her and the baby. The baby has, however, now become part of her family to which Mi is merely an accessory, so he cannot now form a new family with Long. Long is unable to assume his paternity because of his financial status, but is otherwise good with the boy and in some ways better than Mi who becomes frustrated when he fails to settle in an unfamiliar environment. She admits that her mother usually tucks him in and is otherwise lost for what to do, leaving Long quite literally holding the baby.

But on the other hand, perhaps he’s only experiencing an idealised vision of fatherhood while spared the really difficult things like the anxiety of keeping food on the table and roof over his head. His friend at university is married with a child and is constantly late because of childcare issues. He recounts having to stay up all night because his son got enteritis from eating something he shouldn’t have when he wasn’t looking and now has a serious case of the runs. Long appears to want all of this too, but is prevented from having it as the older generation won’t surrender it to him or give Mi and Long the chance to figure it out. The closing scenes have a genuine sense of tragedy as Long watches his family ride away from him while Mi looks back with sadness and an expression that suggests she knows she will likely never see Long again. With minimal dialogue and elegant, expressive composition, Chen charts the course of a love too innocent to survive in a world of oppression and conformity but has only infinite sympathy for the young couple whose simple dreams are denied by generational authoritarianism.

Out of the Blue screened as part of the BFI’s Myriad Voices: Reframing Taiwan New Cinema.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

The Uniform (夜校女生, Chuang Ching-Shen, 2024)

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The problem for Ai (Buffy Chen Yan-fei) is that a minor difference in her uniform causes her to be treated differently. Set in the late ‘90s, Chuang Ching-Shen’s The Uniform (夜校女生, yèxiào nǚshēng) uses the school to examine the stratified nature of the contemporary Taiwanese society and the elitism that governs it. Having failed the main exam, Ai has won a place at a prestigious girls academy but been relegated to the “night school”. To maximise its efficiency, the school operates on a shift system with day pupils attending classes until 4.30pm and the night students taking over until 9. Though there isn’t supposed to be any difference between the two, the night students are treated as a kind of overflow intake and looked down on by the day pupils while some complain that they’re unfairly using up resources which should be theirs by right. 

Despite the differences between them, Ai strikes up an unexpected friendship with a day student with whom she shares a desk, Min (Chloe Xiang Jie-ru). Shy and somewhat timid, Ai is taken by Min’s free spiritedness and often skips out on her classes to do fun things with her like going to a club to see Mayday before they were famous. Min, obviously, never misses out on her education and though she later reveals her own sense of insecurity in not feeling that she fits in at the school nor really deserves to be there, does not really understand Ai’s situation nor her own feelings of frustration and futility. Ai, meanwhile, is attracted by the upper-middle class atmosphere of the day pupils and increasingly embarrassed by her own more humble home life.

Ai’s father died in an accident and her mother runs a cram school out of their home. Ai’s mother (Chi Chin) is always trying to save money and picking up mismatched furniture for free, much to Ai’s annoyance, while Ai also does a series of part-time jobs including working at a ping pong club at the weekend though her mother doesn’t really want her doing sports because they’re unladylike and not all that useful for landing a place at a top university. The reason she sent her to the academy was to give her a leg up into what she sees as a conventionally successful life by getting a degree and finding a man with a professional job to marry. Ai’s resentment is partly provoked by this sense of being railroaded towards a future she might not want while at the same time facing tremendous pressure and afraid that in the end she won’t be able to measure up to her mother’s expectations. 

It’s at the ping pong club that she first meets Luke (Chiu Yi-tai), a handsome student from the elite boys’ school, and begins to strike up a relationship with him before Min tells her she likes him too. This ordinary teenage love triangle is coloured be class conflict in which Ai doubts she has the right to go after Luke because he is from a wealthy family, lying to him to cover up the fact that she and Min skip school by swapping their shirts which are embroidered in different colours for day and night students by claiming to be a pupil in the elite advanced class while hiding from him that she’s actually a night pupil. After beginning to suspect that Luke might actually like Ai, Min too begins to look down on her as if she thought that Ai were forgetting her place and has no right to date him because, unlike her, she is not his social equal. 

As for Luke himself, he’s actually rather bland and in part because his own life seems so easy because of his family’s wealth though he too later lets slip that he feels embarrassed by his parent’s apparently secret divorce and has only just begun to let go of the idea of them getting back together. For much of the film, it seems like he’s merely in the way of the relationship between the two girls which more successfully overcomes the barrier of class. After vicariously enjoying living Min’s lifestyle, Ai eventually comes to realisation that she and Luke are “not the same” and come from different worlds. He doesn’t really care about that, and seems to have become aware of his privilege abandoning a plan to get into university by competing in the maths olympiad and take the exam instead in the interests of “equality,” which is a well-meaning gesture but not really the bold act of egalitarianism he thinks it is even if also emphases his commitment to Ai in his willingness to break down class barriers that might otherwise work to his advantage.

As a means of denying her reality, Ai escapes through writing letters to Nicole Kidman with the help of a young man who speaks English and works in her aunt’s video store but is eventually jolted into adulthood by a more literal earthquake that reminds her how precious each of her relationships is and fragile the world around her. Through her various friendships, Ai comes to understand that almost everyone she knows also suffers with feelings of inferiority or a lack of confidence, weighed down by the pressure to achieve social success which might not be what they want anyway, but that they can overcome them together through understanding and mutual support that crosses class boundaries. Charmingly nostalgic, the film has a sense of hope for the future that it is indeed possible to achieve success on your own terms while prioritising your friendships and taking care of those around you.

The Uniform screens in Chicago 12th April as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Hunter Brothers (獵人兄弟, Su Hung-en, 2024)

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Two brothers find themselves on opposite sides of tradition and modernity as they descend into a state of warfare over the future of the ancestral hunting grounds in Su Hung-en’s familial drama, Hunter Brothers (獵人兄弟). Exploring the complicated position of the indigenous community marginalised by an increasingly capitalistic urbanity the film also critiques contemporary visions of masculinity in the wider society as the brothers each try to find new ways of defining themselves amid changing notions of manly success.

In the opening scenes of the film, Teymu celebrates the fact that his son, Yuci, has become a doctor because now he will never have to do manual labour and will have a more comfortable standard of living. But in private, Teymu seems upset. He feels as if he has failed the ancestors because in the eyes of their community, Yuci is not a proper man. Many people tell him that he is “not cut out to be a hunter,” and he has no desire to be one anyway, but still suffers from a serious inferiority complex and wounded male pride. To find some kind of answer, Teymu forces Yuci against the wishes of his mother to accompany him to the mountains for one last hunting trip to prove himself by killing a wild boar and finally validating Teymu’s own fractured sense of masculinity that his son is indeed a “proper man.”

It’s during this trip that Teymu is killed in mysterious circumstances. Yuci’s brother Siring ends up going to prison for the crime, but unlike him had been more of the son his father wanted. Yuci had been clever and studious, but Siring is more of a traditional mountain man who lives for the hunt and has a very unreconstructed sense of masculinity. But he also loved and understood his brother, knowing this life wasn’t for him and trying to protect him from their father who was in other ways a failure. Teymu drank and was violent, objecting to his wife’s attempts to stop him taking Yuci to the mountain by threatening her and using incredibly offensive language. Yuci’s reaction against this traditional society is also towards his father and everything he represented. But this traditional world is the only one a man like Siring can live in. He has no real qualifications or other skills and cannot survive outside of their community. On his release from prison, Yuci is keen for him to get a job and against his return to hunting, but it soon becomes clear that isn’t a way that Siring can live.

In that respect, they represent opposing polls. Yuci is the modern man of science, a doctor, while Siring is a man of the forests and mountains, Then again, Yuci is a devout Christian and his religion also seemingly a challenge to traditional indigenous practices though also alien to the mainstream society. The boys’ mother is living with dementia and those around them tell Siring that she has most likely been cursed by the ancestors who are angry with them for doing something “dishonest” which might be why she starts insisting Yuci go to the police and that they made a bad decision that should be put right. Yuci, for his part, does not appear to feel guilt for the role he may have played but is anxious that the life he’s built for himself in which is accorded a man by his career success, marriage, and fathering a son, may now crumble if Siring will not fall into line.

Tensions come to a head when Yuci decides to sell their ancestral hunting grounds which are earmarked for a development that would destroy the mountain altogether. Siring obviously objects, this world is the only one he can live in, but can do little about it. He resists his brother’s modernity and becomes estranged from him, but they are both in their way exiles and neither of them can fully live in this society. The natural affection they hold for each other as brothers is not enough to bridge this divide and merely leaves each of them lonely and alone, mired in futility and unable to move forward in any meaningful way. The ebb and flow of their lives is reflected in the way they are alternately called by their indigenous names and Mandarin equivalents, each of them living in two worlds but never really at home in either while fever divided from themselves.

Hunter Brothers screens in Chicago 29th March as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

BFI to Host “Myriad Voices: Reframing Taiwan New Cinema”

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Throughout April 2025, the BFI will be hosting a season of films exploring Taiwanese New Cinema from new perspectives including a selection of films from lesser known filmmakers alongside those of heavy hitters such as Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Duckweed (aka Floating Weeds)

Edward Yang’s television debut after returning to Taiwan, Duckweed was part of the Eleven Women TV series produced by Sylvia Chang and Chen Chun-tian, and follows a young woman who moves to Taipei from the countryside to become a model.

In Our Time

1982 anthology film featuring instalments directed by Tao Te-chen, Edward Yang, Ko I-chen, Chang Yi.

The Boys from Fengkuei

1983 drama from Hou Hsiao-hsien following a group of young men who leave their fishing village after getting into trouble with gangsters and try to make new lives for themselves in Kaohsiung.

Chen Kun-hou, who was the film’s cinematographer, will introduce the screening on 11th April.

The Sandwich Man

Tripartite anthology film featuring instalments by Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tseng Chuang-hsiang, and Wan Jen adapting short stories by Huang Chun-ming.

Out of the Blue

1984 drama from Chen Kun-hou in which teenagers Jielong and Tangmi spend a single night together before she disappears and Jielong must return to university.

Director Chen Kun-hou will be present for a Q&A following the screening on 10th April.

Ah Fei

Drama adapted from a short story by Liao Hui-ying and following a woman over several decades after the Chinese Civil War.

Kuei-mei, a Woman

A woman’s stoical endurance of hardship as she travels towards hard-won prosperity mirrors that of her nation in Chang Yi’s allegorical maternal melodrama. Review.

My Favorite Season

1985 Chen Kun-hou drama starring Sylvia Chang as a woman who conceives a child with her married boss but wants to break up with him and raise the baby on her own.

Director Chen Kun-hou will be present for a Q&A following the screening on 11th April.

Taipei Story

An ambitious young woman is determined to keep pushing forward while her more traditional boyfriend remains trapped in the past in Yang’s melancholy urban drama. Review.

A Time to Live and a Time to Die

Semi-autobiographical drama from Hou Hsiao-hsien following a young man in Fengshan from 1947 to 1965.

This Love of Mine

Psychological drama from Chang Yi adapted from the novel by Hsiao Sa in which a woman must re-evaluate her life after learning of her husband’s affair.

The Terrorisers

Landmark drama from Edward Yang in which a doctor and his novelist wife teetering on the brink of divorce, a voyeuristic photographer, and a rebellious teen are connected by a single event.

Strawman

Satirical comedy set at the end of the war in which two farmers find an unexploded bomb in their field and decide to carry it to the Japanese police in the hope of a reward.

Autumn Tempest

Huang Yu-shan’s 1988 narrative film debut in which a young man retreats to a mountain temple to study but enters an affair with a young woman who subsequently becomes pregnant.

Director Huang Yu-shan will be present for a Q&A following the screening on 12th April.

A City of Sadness

Historical drama from Hou Hsiao-hsien set immediately after the liberation from Japanese colonial rule following a family who become embroiled in the White Terror following the February 28 incident.

Myriad Voices: Reframing Taiwan New Cinema runs at the BFI Southbank throughout April.

Park (Taman-taman) (公園, So Yo-hen, 2024)

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“Maybe they don’t want to make a film that conveys a message,” one of the men at the centre of So Yo-hen’s poetic documentary hybrid Park (Taman Taman) remarks, “they want the audience to find and seek the message themselves”. Admitting that he’s already quite tired of the process and wondering what the point of it is, Asri is likely right in his assumption that So’s film does not necessarily intend to convey a message but perhaps hopes that one will gradually emerge as the men make an elliptical journey through a park in Taiwan while each of them revealing that they likely can’t stay long enough to actually finish this film. 

This in itself may reflect their liminal status as mature students from Indonesia who have recently concluded their studies and are thinking about the future. Asri intends to go back to Indonesia to become an academic, while Hanan has responsibilities to his family as the only boy. But both of them are mindful of the irony that they were given this opportunity to study because of a reciprocal agreement between Taiwan and Indonesia that allowed them to come as students in recompense for an exchange of labour. They are also migrants, but position themselves as slightly to the side of those who come to work while reflecting on the precarious position of their countrymen and more to the point countrywomen who are often expected to sacrifice their own lives to earn money abroad. 

“This labour, this body, this mind, is no longer mine,” a “40-year-old woman from Jakarta” reveals in a poem titled “For the Sake of Money”. “They call me “a forge in exchange hero,” she explains with a note of bitterness as if her body and her labour had become a tool for the state or else converted into money to be “enjoyed” by others leaving little for herself. The body in this story seems to belong to no one, Hanan remarks to the woman who has now replaced Asri. A cue of other migrant workers extends behind her from the police box the men had co-opted for their imaginary radio show while Hanan contemplates the story of a woman named Listi who came to Taiwan to care for an elderly woman with dementia and doesn’t have many friends, spending her breaks in the park watching the woman on her phone screen. 

Asri tells the story of another migrant worker whose shame father was picked up by an authoritarian regime and later came to Taiwan to care for a soldier’s mother leaving her own children behind. The woman has a degree of pride rather than just bitterness and is proud of the way she raised her children and the life she led in Taiwan after marrying the soldier. There are, however, lingering reminders of Taiwan’s own authoritarian regime including the guard post the men shelter under. They wonder at a speaker disguised as a stone which now broadcasts music into the night air. As the woman from Jakarta said, the night can be endless, and so is the odyssey of Asri and Hainan walking laps of the park in an endless cycle while reading poetry and reflecting on their lives. 

Asri comes to the conclusion that the filmmakers are trying “to capture slow things in a fast-paced world,” which again seems to be fairly on point as the park slowly becomes a kind of mythical space that exists on this night only or perhaps one night is all nights in the park. It becomes a place of refuge and community as the migrant workers gather to talk and sing or exchange poetry. Asri and Hanan become like ghostly narrators, leaving their mark on this place though they are both shortly to depart as they wander around through the endless night. Though the night may indeed be endless, still the migrant workers must return to work even as their scooters light up the darkness and their song drifts through and around them. A slow thing in a fast-paced world, the park itself takes on an elegiac quality as a place of sadness and boredom but also a warmth and community as Asri reflects of the “depth of idealism” of the young filmmakers he once worked with on this strange and hypnotic project.

Park (Taman-taman) screens at Museum of the Moving Image 13th March as part of this year’s First Look

Trailer (Traditional Chinese & English subtites)

Sunset Over the Horizon (夕陽西下, Lin Fu-Ti, 1968)

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Shot at the same time as The Love in Okinawa, Sunset Over the Horizon (夕陽西下) is another Okinawan and Taiwanese co-production directed by Lin Fu-ti assumed lost until its discovery in San Francisco’s Chinatown in a Mandarin-dubbed print. Unsurprisingly, it features many of the same cast members and locations and even has a similar theme of impossible love but is more ambitious in scope incorporating both dream sequences and flashbacks to explore the changing relationship between Japan and Taiwan.

Lin opens the film with its conclusion as Shizuko watches a boat silently depart carrying away her love, the much older pastor/penniless painter Ching-wen who has made the decision to return to Taiwan having finally faced, if not quite come to terms with, his traumatic past at the end of the war and Taiwan’s “liberation” from Japanese colonisation. Japan had conquered Taiwan by force in 1895, but otherwise ruled with much less of an iron fist than it did in other areas of its empire. Lin seems to be making a minor point in dramatising the moment of “liberation” as one of conflicting emotions as the Japanese flag is slowly lowered and that of the KMT, another colonising force, rises in its place meaning that the island is not really “liberated” at all, merely changing hands and to a regime that became more oppressive than that which preceded it had been. 

The irony is that it’s this “liberation” that disrupted his romantic future as a young Taiwanese student in love with the daughter of a Japanese general. With the end of the war, the Japanese must leave Taiwan and so his love must go with them and return to the mainland. She asks Ching-wen to come with her, but he refuses. He is unwilling to leave his nation and his family, though we can see he did so years later and traveled to her hometown of Okinawa though she ultimately chose to take her own life out of a sense of despair and futility. She could not return to Japan with Ching-wen nor stay with him in Taiwan either and so to her the only answer, the only real “liberation,” lay in death.

Shizuko later posits something similar even if her dilemma is different. Her businessman father wants her to marry the son of a local factory owner so that he will support his business but Shizuko refuses because she wants to fall in love and does not seem to like her father’s chosen suitor. The situation is somewhat complicated by the fact that Shizuko is a child of her father’s first marriage and is therefore resented by her stepmother who wants her to leave the family as quickly as possible. In some ways this dynastic union represents a decision to embrace the more consumerist future that Japan in the later 1960s represents. Ching-wen on the other hand despite his ruination represents something purer and more spiritual that is less materialistic and rooted in sincere emotion. Shizuko insists that the businessman may buy her body but never her heart, but that seems perfectly fine to him because it seems he’s not all that bothered about her heart and just wants to possess her like a trophy. Frustrated by her objections, he continues to offer greater sums of money and later tells his underling, who looks horrified, that he plans to keep her locked up at home.

But there are other forces which stand in the couple’s way such as the inappropriate 18-year age gap considering that Shizuko is only 19 years old meaning she was born around the time Ching-wen’s first love died (probably at around the same age). It appears that Ching-wen is protestant preacher and so there’s no religious reason why he should not be married, but it’s clear that he has a serious alcohol problem and is a broken, ruined shell of a man unable to bear the romantic heartbreak he endured as a student and has presumably been atoning for ever since. Given all of this, there is no real explanation for the love that exists between them in the first place save for physical attraction (which is less likely given Ching-wen’s unkempt appearance) or a meeting of souls. In the end the theme seems to be moving on from the past and we realise that the lovers cannot be together because Japan and Taiwan must in effect go their separate ways. Though Shizuko too says she longs to return to Taiwan (when she lived there is not explained), she must fulfil her duty to her father by marrying the Japanese businessman. Over the horizon, there is only ever a sunset with no real indication of a happier future in the distance only futility and endurance if also a new beginning in moving on from the traumatic past.

Sunset Over the Horizon screened as part of this year’s Cinema at Sea.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Next Stop, Somewhere (別來無恙, James Lee, 2025)

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What does “freedom” actually mean? Will money buy it for you or just result in another kind of prison in which you cannot really say you’re free because you don’t feel like you have the choice to leave? Leaving is really at the centre of James Lee’s sensitive drama Next Stop, Somewhere (別來無恙, biéláiwúyàng) in which the protagonists of parallel stories have both left their homelands not altogether by choice in search of a greater freedom that they nevertheless struggle to find.

Hong Kong actor Huang (Anthony Wong Chau-sang) has left Hong Kong in search of political freedom in the wake of the Umbrella Movement, but is immediately constrained by coronavirus quarantine on his arrival in Taiwan. He is constantly trying to get in contact with a man called James who also seems to be in some political trouble and is not always able to answer, which is a problem because James is supposed to be handling the transfer of his money out of Hong Kong. Huang might be “free” of political oppression, but in reality one is never “free” without money and arguably not even then because of the necessity of acquiring it. That seems to be part of the problem for his maid at the hotel, Xiao Qian (Angel Lee), who feels trapped in a relationship that no longer seems to be working while unable to leave it because neither of them can afford the rent on their own.

Xiao Qian’s relationship is with another woman and perhaps it could be argued that in Taipei she at least has the freedom to live with the person she loved, though on the other hand she pointedly refuses to explain when her girlfriend Bae shows up at the hotel looking for her after she stops answering her calls or messages. Bae also seems to have mental health issues that also perhaps prevent Qian from leaving her, though she continues to treat her coldly and repeatedly refuses her requests for intimacy. It seems that Qian wanted to study abroad in America, but so far has been unable to go. A $100 bill to her represents another kind of freedom, though as she later says to Huang in the end freedom about having the choice to leave.

A $100 bill meant freedom for Kim (Kendra Sow) too, but like Huang she finds herself trapped by the realisation that the note did not represent what she was led to believe it would. Not entirely of her own choice, Kim leaves Vietnam to become the mail order bride of a Malaysian man who claimed to be a wealthy businessman in his 40s but in reality is a market trader quite a bit older than that. Mr Li (Mike Chuah) is totally besotted with his new brides, telling his friends that there were cheaper girls available but his is the prettiest. But in the end he’s trapped by this situation too. It’s clear he hadn’t thought through the reality and was acting out a kind of romantic fantasy. Young and naive, Kim recoils from his touch and building a relationship with her is impossible because she doesn’t speak Mandarin and he doesn’t know Vietnamese. They’re hassled by immigration officials and Mr Li’s irate mother who berates Kim insisting that they only brought her here to have a son and heir so she’s not fulfilling her obligations. For his part, Mr Li is partly sympathetic in that it’s clear he has no desire to force himself on Kim and hurt, if understanding, that she rejects him. When he eventually does try to force her, he can’t go through with it because of the sight of her tears. 

As her mother-in-law feared she might, Kim finds release though a growing relationship with the immigration officer who’s closer to her in age and also an outsider, rejected by Mr Li’s mother on the grounds of his ethnicity. Through love, she finds another kind of “freedom”, but with it constraint and it remains unclear how this situation will play out even as, like Huang, she surrenders the $100 bill to someone who needs it more. To pass time in quarantine, Huang orders a copy of Mishima’s Temple of the Golden Pavilion, a book about a young monk who sets fire to the temple because he can’t bear the existence of something so beautiful in this profane world. Having not yet finished the book after Huang lent it to her, Qian asks him why the boy did it and he replies that perhaps he felt trapped and that only by burning the temple down could he be free. To that extent, for each of them “freedom” means burning the world behind you and never looking back, if only in a purely symbolic sense in finding the courage to leave a dissatisfying situation, no matter how impossible that might seem, along with the willingness to look for happiness somewhere else. 

Next Stop, Somewhere screens as part of this year’s Cinema at Sea.

International trailer

The Love in Okinawa (琉球之戀, Lin Fu-Ti, 1968)

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Though he may be captain of his own boat, a young man finds himself powerless in the matters of love in Lin Fu-Ti’s Taiyupian romance, The Love in Okinawa (琉球之戀). Long thought lost and recently restored from a Mandarin-dubbed print discovered in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the film was a collaboration between Taiwan and locally based film companies completed shortly before the islands’ return to Japanese sovereignty after an extended period of American occupation. Though the two nations share a degree of common ground in their experience of Japanese colonialism, the film seems to suggest that nothing really good comes of trying to do business here and events might have progressed differently if the family had not delayed its return to Taiwan.

Nevertheless, the real problem is that Hung-hai is a boat captain who in theory possesses the total freedom of the wide open seas yet he is unable to defy his father and marry the woman he loves out of a sense of filial piety. Hung-hai and Hsui-ling were childhood friends and their fathers were once like brothers only to be forced apart by a business dispute ending in a court case which Hung-hai’s father lost. Hsiu-ling’s father’s business later went bust anyway and he has been dead for several years but Hung-hai’s father still harbours fierce resentment towards him. The family went through a period of financial hardship following the court case during which Hung-hai’s mother worked herself to the bone gathering money for their new start. Hung-hai’s father blames his former friend for hastening his wife’s early death which is why he can’t accept Hsiu-ling, to whom he was once like an uncle, as his daughter-in-law.

But on the other hand he also has his own plans for his son’s life which include marrying Yoshiko. Yoshiko is the current “Miss Okinawa” and a minor celebrity who appears on television singing Japanese songs such as Mari Sono’s 1966 hit Yume wa Yoru Hiraku. She is always dressed in kimono, while Hsui-ling wears more westernised contemporary fashions but is later seen in more recognisably Chinese-style after her return to Taiwan. To that extent, Yoshiko represents a closer union with the growing economic powerhouse of Japan as mediated through Okinawa, while Hsui-ling represents an unsullied Taiwan yet one still restrained by increasingly outdated notions of filiality.

Eventually, after a series of ironies, Hung-hai’s father is forced to admit that his authoritarianism and refusal to allow his son to chart his own destiny has destroyed his family’s future. Unable to marry Hsui-ling who thinks that he has married Yoshiko after seeing her announce their engangement on television while he was away on his boat, Hung-hai falls into depression and takes to drink. Though he had long favoured Hung-hai to take over the business over his older son Ah-qin who has a physical disability and was therefore left behind in Taiwan to babysit the domestic business, Hung-hai’s father begins to realise the mistakes he has made and that in this ruined state Hung-hai will never amount to anything nor prove a worthy heir for his business empire.

Ah-qin, meanwhile, is oblivious to all this and the soul of kindness and decency. In some ways, he might play into a stereotypical vision of disabled people as saintly and innocent, yet is unwittingly drawn into his brother’s romantic drama knowing nothing of his father’s animosity towards Hsui-ling and her family nor of his brother’s love for her which is the cause of his depression. He wants only for everyone in his family to be happy, and in the end is willing to sacrifice his own happiness to facilitate it (which is a paradoxical expression of “positive” filiality). Hung-hai had suggested simply running away and eloping to Taiwan but Hsui-ling’s mother was on her deathbed and neither of them really had the stomach to abandon their parents in a “foreign” land. Thus this kind of filiality that divides the lovers is nothing but destructive. Not only does it ruin the family entirely, disrupting the relationship between the brothers as well as between father and sons, but leads only to futility and heartbreak in which true freedom is found only in death.

The Love in Okinawa screens as part of this year’s Cinema at Sea.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Moneyboys (金錢男孩, C.B. Yi, 2021)

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“Who doesn’t sell themselves to make money?” a young man asks in C.B. Yi’s melancholy mainland-set drama Moneyboys (金錢男孩, Jīnqián Nánhái) relating the story of a relative who worked as a tanner all his life, became ill from the effects of the chemicals, and died alone far from home. He may suggest that the exploitative nature of contemporary capitalism will eventually consume you, but it’s an older set of social codes that do for Fei (Kai Ko) who consumes himself in a pathological desire for self-sacrifice as if constantly trying to prove himself worthy of acceptance.

As we first meet Fei he introduces himself as “Jackson”, a naive country boy in the city seeking a means to support his struggling rural family which he finds in sex work. Through his job, he encounters the swaggering Xiaolai (JC Lin) who introduces himself as “Max” and takes him under his wing. Soon they fall head over heels in love, but Xiaolai fears Fei’s desperation and lack of judgment in his choice of client, an anxiety which is later borne out when Fei is badly beaten by a local gangster. Filled with rage, Xiaolai attacks him with a metal bar but ends up badly beaten himself and thereafter sought by the police. Not wanting any trouble, Fei skips town and five years later has started a new, apparently much more successful life, in another city. 

“You’re always living for others” he’s later told by a childhood friend, Long (Bai Yufan), whose long-term crush on him Fei seems to be wilfully ignoring, “the way you sacrifice yourself, you constantly hurt yourself and sometimes others too”. Fei’s self-sacrificing nature does indeed seem to have a masochist component as he wilfully puts himself in dangerous situations to get money to provide for his family. His family, however, reject him precisely because of the nature of the sacrifices he is making. Returning to his home town after being unjustly hassled by local police who attempt to entrap him by getting an undercover officer to pose as a client and searching his home for drugs, Fei is physically attacked by a belligerent uncle who can’t stop ranting about Fei’s marital status beginning by berating him that his family is embarrassed because he has no wife before revealing that they all know about “what you did in the city” and are shamed by it. His father barely looks at him, though his sister appears to know and encourages him to find the right person and hold on to them because life is long and she doesn’t want him to be lonely. 

Later, another woman reassures him that he is “someone who deserves love” though he struggles to accept it. He feels indebted to Xiaolai because he lost a leg for him, unable to move past the transactional nature of love to accept it from someone who wants only the same in return. Consumed by internalised shame he struggles to let go of outdated traditional social codes and unlike Long is unwilling to abandon them in order to live the life he wants. One of his sex worker friends in his new city eventually enters into a sham marriage with a woman who is fully aware of the realities and later pledges to move back to the country and raise a child as a conventional husband and father while tearfully explaining that six years with the gay community have been the best of his life. He too has made a sacrifice of himself for his family but is already torn apart with disappointment and resentment. 

Fei’s tragedy is that he tries to please everyone but himself, revelling in his self-sacrificing suffering and barely noticing when others are caught in the crossfire. Unable to let himself go, he is left only with the memory of the one time he was happy, which wasn’t the one he originally thought it was, and the simultaneous knowledge that he has lost It forever through his own thoughtlessness. Trapped in the past both by the traditional social codes and his thwarted romance with Xiaolai he envisions an ironically progressive compromise but is unable to see the selfishness in his desires perhaps for once putting himself first in failing to consider the feelings of those around him. A neon-lit vista of loneliness, C.B Yi’s melancholy tale of self-imprisonment and the commodification of love discovers only unhappiness in the midst of a repressive social culture defined by the twin poles of rampant consumerism and the filial imperative. 

Trailer (English subtitles)