Many have cried walking out of the movie theater after watching Taiwanese director Yee Chih-yen's (
Following Tuesday's well-received screening at the Hotel Noga Hilton, the main site of the Director's Fortnight section of this year's Cannes International Film Festival, audience and journalists alike filed into the press conference to fire off a seemingly endless stream of questions about the film. Both Yee and his producer, Peggy Chiao (
PHOTO COURTESY OF ARC LIGHT
French journalists referred to Blue Gate as a "gay" film, a categorization with which Yee took issue. "For me, it's not a film about homosexuality. It's rather a film about young people coping with their problems in life," Yee said.
PHOTO: YU SEN-LUN, TAIPEI TIMES
The film is set in a Taipei City high school and looks at the life of three teens during an unforgettable summer. Guei Lun-mei (
Lin Yue-zhen, played by Liang Shu-hui (
Lin goes to the swimming pool every night to spy on Zhang, who sneaks into the closed swimming pool to practice. She collects the used bottles of mineral water Zhang finishes. She asks Meng, her best friend, to pass a love letter to Zhang."I want to be friends with you," she writes, but the "sunshine boy" becomes attached to the messenger, Meng, and waits around her door.
Zhang, a blithe spirit, is a guileless boy. "I'm Zhang from swimming team and guitar club. I'm not bad!" he always says to Meng. His two dearest wishes are to win the swimming championship and to become Meng's sweetheart. He's unaware of the secret Meng is about to tell him, the secret that might have them taste a melancholy they've never before tasted.
The Blue Gate Crossing is a seemingly simple light story about Taipei's teenagers looking inwards to see their souls.
Yee excels at exploring the intimate world of the main character, Meng -- her troubled self-image and emotionally tumultuous world. She's precocious and knows about loneliness earlier than her classmates. Although she has a nice heart and is friendly to Lin and Zhang, and also a gym teacher who becomes attracted to her, she cannot let them into her world.
"I feel sympathy with the character because I also feel a lot of solitude," Guei said. "It was not that difficult to enter the role. I feel that in reality there must be confused girls like Meng," she said.
Yee perfectly captures the nuances of being a teenager in middle-class Taipei. "We auditioned nearly 4000 teenagers and finally found Guei and Chen from the Hsimenting area last summer," Yee said.
In order to faithfully depict the world of high school, Yee went to school with the students everyday for two weeks. Yee is experienced in dealing with teenage subjects.
Having done several TV dramas about teenagers in previous years, he became a devoted observer of youth in Taipei.
"A lot of stories about teenagers have imposed too much moral judgement on their world. But I want a story from the teenager's point of view. They should find their own right or wrong," Yee said.
This experience being with youngsters made it easy for Yee to direct the three real high school students. "Two crucial parts -- Meng kissing her best friend, and Meng revealing the secret to Chen -- only took one take to shoot. The actors really entered the world of the story," Yee said.
The result revealed in the film is Yee's sharpness and preciseness about the value of being young and how an adolescent mind suddenly becomes an adult mind. This sharpness also gives weight and a certain melancholy to the film's conclusion.
"The blue gate is a symbol for me in the film. It's an image of the future. Everyone has a blue gate in their hearts," Yee said. "As for the melancholy, it's probably me. It's just how I think," he said.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
Mongolian influencer Anudari Daarya looks effortlessly glamorous and carefree in her social media posts — but the classically trained pianist’s road to acceptance as a transgender artist has been anything but easy. She is one of a growing number of Mongolian LGBTQ youth challenging stereotypes and fighting for acceptance through media representation in the socially conservative country. LGBTQ Mongolians often hide their identities from their employers and colleagues for fear of discrimination, with a survey by the non-profit LGBT Centre Mongolia showing that only 20 percent of people felt comfortable coming out at work. Daarya, 25, said she has faced discrimination since she
RSS