Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt shortly after arriving back in Taipei from the Hong Kong International Film Festival, director Singing Chen (陳芯宜) looks tired and has armed herself with a large cup of coffee for our interview. Her film God Man Dog (流浪神狗人) has been a fixture on the international film festival circuit since late last year and has garnered awards and recognition both in Taiwan and abroad. Which is pretty impressive, considering it's only her second full-length feature film, and one that was made eight years after her directorial debut.
Chen says her life hit a low point after her first film, Bundled (我叫阿銘啦), which caused her to entertain serious doubts about her abilities as a filmmaker. Fortunately, however, she didn't give up on her dream, a dream that was hatched during an apprenticeship with documentary filmmaker Huang Ming-chuan (黃明川) back in 1995, when Chen was a broadcast major at Fu Jen Catholic University (輔仁大學). "That experience … had a major influence on my creative career," she says, "since I realized that there was nothing a woman could not do." Since then Chen has continued to work with Huang on several projects, including an ambitious documentary profiling 100 Taiwanese poets.
The idea for Bundled formed during her senior year when she interviewed homeless people in Taipei's Wanhua district for a class project. Chen ended up spending the next three years checking up on her interviewees from time to time and even made friends with a few of them. She mined those experiences for the film, which tells the story of a homeless man named A-ming (阿銘) and his fellow vagrants. Bundled brought together a team of young filmmakers and close friends - including director and cinema-tographer Shen Ko-shang (沈可尚), art director Huang Mei-ching (黃美清), playwright Lou Yi-an (樓一安) and sound designer Dennis Tsao (曹源峰) - who have collaborated with each other ever since.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
After Bundled, Chen returned to making documentaries, directing, editing, cinematographing and even making soundtracks for her works. (Chen has played piano since the age of 4 and was keyboard player for pioneering underground band 431.) Most of the documentaries she made were about performing artists, whom she kept in touch with and continued to film even after completing her projects.
Chen is a willing heir to Huang Ming-chuan, who is notorious for taking a decade to complete a film and who believes a documentary shot under time pressure is a documentary that is only fit to be aired as an expository piece on the Discovery Channel. But after her critically acclaimed debut, Chen found herself facing a moral dilemma. The local film industry was in a slump and discord had arisen over the question of how to save Taiwanese cinema. Some in the industry felt directors should make movies that appealed to a mass audience instead of the art-house films that were driving local audiences away.
The pressure gradually got to her. "I remember thinking, 'What if my next film doesn't sell? I would be one of those responsible for killing Taiwanese cinema,'" Chen recalls. "Directors are not what you think, a bunch of artists who care only for their art. We do take our social responsibilities seriously," she says, laughing.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Chen got over her frustrations when she was commissioned to make a documentary on the choreographer Lin Li-chen (林麗珍) in 2005. Lin encouraged the once-lost director to finish a script she had been working on for five years. It took her only two months to complete the script, which was for God Man Dog, an allegorical tale about contemporary Taiwan that ties together the stories of three unfortunate protagonists.
During her years of experience as a documentary filmmaker, Chen has traveled across Taiwan and met a motley assortment of people, ranging from famous intellectuals to ordinary people in the countryside. These encounters have worked their way into her latest film. Jack Kao's (高捷) character Yellow Bull in God Man Dog, for example, a man who is an optimist in spite of his problems, is an excellent representation of the kind of person you meet in the Taiwanese countryside.
Both of Chen's features are about the disadvantaged: the homeless in the case of Bundled; impoverished Aborigines in God Man Dog. "I am naturally drawn to people living on margins of the society, like the people who sell magnolias or hand out flyers in traffic," the 34-year-old director says. "I want to get to know them [as real people], not take pity on them or care for them like a philanthropist standing above them. Their life experiences are much richer than ours, and they should be respected as our equals."
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
In order to escape the stereotypes society has imposed on her protagonists, Chen conjures up the dreamlike and inexplicable elements of magic realism, which allows her to look them from a new perspective, without abandoning a realistic setting. There exists a distinct aesthetic and visual coherence between Chen's two features, as the images and sound move on an intuitive level and sometimes even drive the story itself.
"I have my preferences for art direction and visual style, such as having a whirl of resplendent colors set against the bleak urban landscape," she says. "Images come when I write the script, and sometimes it is the visuals that carry out the story rather than the plot."
A good, solid script is, however, the soul of Chen's art. She believes an engaging story is essential to woo audiences back to the theater, since low-budget local productions cannot beat Hollywood blockbusters on any other front. Chen's creative process involves countless days and nights invested in polishing her scripts. Her work is a refreshing departure from the self-indulgence world many local young auteurs are trapped in. It avoids the extremes of abstruse art-house cinema on the one hand and genre-driven commercial movies on the other.
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"In countries like the US, there is a niche for films like 21 Grams, The Constant Gardner and There Will Be Blood. They have something to say and a good story to tell at the same time. Taiwan lacks this kind of cinema, and I happen to be interested in this kind of film," Chen says.
Chen has received several offers for God Man Dog from foreign distributors, indicating she has scored a success with her second feature. Ironically, Chen says she thought the film was a complete disaster when saw the first cut, and she could tell by the gloomy faces of the crew members in the screening room that they felt the same way.
"I remember writing in my diary: 'Singing Chen, your are screwed. You made a shitty, shitty film,'" she says. Chen admits that this might seem funny in hindsight, but at the time co-writer Lou was forced to listen Chen whine "I am screwed" over and over again.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Chen took two months to re-familiarize herself with the material and another six months to re-edit the film and give it a more coherent structure. The result was a film that won the Tagesspiegel Readers' Prize at the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival's Forum for New Cinema.
As for her next feature film, this humble director believes it won't take another eight years. She no longer doubts herself and she now knows that directors can't take all of the blame for the Taiwanese film industry's slump.
As to what Chen's next movie will be about, a clue may lie in a documentary about buto dancers she has been working on.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
"Making documentaries for me is like a thought process. It gives me opportunities to ask questions," she says. "These will eventually become the sources for my feature films."
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
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