A cinematic account of national history is never an easy task for filmmakers, who must do justice to the past yet produce a movie that is more entertaining than a teaching aid.
Based on Ching Da Kuei Di (情歸大地), a novel by Li Chiao (李喬), one of Taiwan’s best-known Hakka writers, 1895 (一八 九 五) brings to life the Hakka militias’ resistance to Japanese troops after Qing Dynasty China was defeated in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894 to 1895) and ceded Taiwan to Tokyo under the Treaty of Shimonoseki.
The ambitious work is educational at best and, with its barely passable storytelling techniques, is unlikely to attract an audience that goes beyond educators
and students.
Local starlet Cheryl Yang (楊謹華) plays the role of Huang Hsien-mei, the virtuous wife of Wu Tang-Wu Tang-xing, played by Wen Sheng-hao (溫昇豪). A well-educated young Hakka, Wu organizes guerrilla resistance against the Japanese together with two Hakka leaders, Jiang Shao-zu (姜紹祖), played by Chang Shu-hao (張書豪), and Hsu Xiang (徐驤), played by Wu Hao-sheng (吳皓昇).
Though the Chinese high officials who proclaimed the short-lived Taiwan Republic in response to the Treaty of Shimonoseki flee to China, leaving the Hakka militias to their own devices without sufficient rations, money or munitions, the resistance forces manage to keep the Japanese from advancing south.
The guerrillas persist and casualties mount. Carting supplies to the front with other villagers, Huang sees her husband, for the last time, before Wu and his men lose a decisive battle on Bagua Mountain (八卦山) in Changhua County, which saw about 4,700 Japanese and 14,000 Taiwanese fighters killed.
The film’s lack of funding — the budget was NT$60 million — is acutely felt. Instead of turning the more than modest funds into inspiration for imagination, director Hung took an aesthetic approach that is more slippers-and-spears television than cinematic by having some 30 extras running about aimlessly in the battle scenes, which are touted as the film’s high points.
The most bothering, if not purely absurd, part of the movie occurs in the scene when Aboriginal, Taiwanese and Hakka comrades are seen standing together in an act of unity. Used as human props, two extras in Aboriginal garb remain faceless in the shade throughout the scene, never to reappear.
1895’s cast members give passable performances with the exception of veteran actor Li Xing-wen (李興文), who plays a Taiwanese bandit and delivers well-appreciated comic relief without turning his character into caricature.
Young Japanese actor Koichiro Kijima fails to impress as Ogai Mori, the famed Japanese physician and novelist who was sent to Taiwan in 1895 and, in the film, attempts to give the occupying army a human face in the guise of a benevolent colonist.
Returning to the director’s seat after his feature debut, the rom-com Pure Accidents (純屬意外), director Hung is likely to go unnoticed with this ambitious, yet flaccid epic.
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS