Departing from a narrative about the city’s misfits and the displaced in A Place of One’s Own (一席之地, 2009), writer-director Lou Yi-an (樓一安) turns to rural underdogs for his second feature film The Losers (廢物), a socially-conscious drama that tackles some of the difficult issues facing Taiwan’s farming villages as told through the stories of those deemed “losers.”
Articulately written and finely executed, the film is a brave probe into the dark sides of rural life that finds little, if any, treatment in the current genre-inclined Taiwanese cinema.
Among Lou’s losers, Shiou, played by theater veteran Hsu Hua-chien (徐華謙), is a struggling stage actor in Taipei who works odd jobs to make ends meet. Frustrated, he returns to his Greater Kaohsiung suburb hometown, Meinong (美濃), only to be greeted with a disapproving look from his aging father, who claims that those who stay in town are either drug addicts or jobless.
Photo Courtesy of Good Days Film
While trying to learn about his farmer father’s trade and grow tomatoes on the family farm, Shiou meets an old girlfriend, Mei-shia, played by Tsou singer and actress Paicx Yatauyungana, better known by her Chinese name, Kao Hui-chun (高慧君). Now married, Mei-shia lives an affluent but spiritless life in a mansion along with her teenage son Ah-pan (Pan Chin-yu, 潘親御), as the husband and father, Tian-jin (Lin Chih-ju, 林志儒), spends most of the time away in China, accumulating wealth.
Soon, the flame is rekindled between the failed actor and the bored wife.
Ah-pan, a typically troubled teen, befriends classmate Yu-mei (Chiu Su-chin), a girl from a poor household barely sustained by her Vietnamese mother. Unable to find work after a serious workplace injury, Yu-mei’s father has been in and out of jail for stealing to support his drug habit.
The newly found friendship between the two turns into a romance, then a romance in jeopardy when Yu-mei finds out about Ah-pan’s ketamine abuse, which offers a quick escape from the dead-end mentality of small town life.
Meanwhile, real-estate speculators have been systematically buying the fertile land of Meinong, aiming at property development. Shiou’s family farm is no exception from the development craze, and industrialist Tian-jin is eager to get his hands on it.
Compared to the director’s loud, uneven debut feature, The Losers suggests a more assured direction that lays out the multitude of issues Lou wishes to examine at a thoughtful pace. Drug abuse, rural poverty and land exploitation are among the most obvious. Looming in the background is the omnipotent force of capitalist globalization, colluding with misguided agricultural policies.
And it is the underprivileged who are hit the hardest. A sense of defeat pervades the film, whether an aging farmer, Southeast Asian immigrant, disillusioned youth or an Aboriginal resident, unnamed and unrecognizable on her own land. At one point, the simmering discontent and frustration boil over, somewhat feebly, through the character of Ah-pan, who, high on ketamine, sinks back into oblivion while listening to the sound of Kou Chou Ching’s (拷秋勤) Civil Revolt (官逼民反), a song that has often been played over the past few months at protests on Ketagalan Boulevard.
But Lou deals with this raw anger intelligently. As in his previous work, he uses dark humor to examine injustice and oppression. It mocks and makes the unbearable absurd and comic, while adorning his characters and their struggles with a new sense of warmth.
Along with Cho Li’s (卓立) less successful The Rice Bomber (白米炸彈客), which opened in local theaters last month, The Losers brings a largely absent and thus much-needed focus on Taiwan’s rural life, raise important, difficult questions in a manner accessible to anyone who is concerned.
April 14 to April 20 In March 1947, Sising Katadrepan urged the government to drop the “high mountain people” (高山族) designation for Indigenous Taiwanese and refer to them as “Taiwan people” (台灣族). He considered the term derogatory, arguing that it made them sound like animals. The Taiwan Provincial Government agreed to stop using the term, stating that Indigenous Taiwanese suffered all sorts of discrimination and oppression under the Japanese and were forced to live in the mountains as outsiders to society. Now, under the new regime, they would be seen as equals, thus they should be henceforth
Last week, the the National Immigration Agency (NIA) told the legislature that more than 10,000 naturalized Taiwanese citizens from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) risked having their citizenship revoked if they failed to provide proof that they had renounced their Chinese household registration within the next three months. Renunciation is required under the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), as amended in 2004, though it was only a legal requirement after 2000. Prior to that, it had been only an administrative requirement since the Nationality Act (國籍法) was established in
With over 80 works on display, this is Louise Bourgeois’ first solo show in Taiwan. Visitors are invited to traverse her world of love and hate, vengeance and acceptance, trauma and reconciliation. Dominating the entrance, the nine-foot-tall Crouching Spider (2003) greets visitors. The creature looms behind the glass facade, symbolic protector and gatekeeper to the intimate journey ahead. Bourgeois, best known for her giant spider sculptures, is one of the most influential artist of the twentieth century. Blending vulnerability and defiance through themes of sexuality, trauma and identity, her work reshaped the landscape of contemporary art with fearless honesty. “People are influenced by
The remains of this Japanese-era trail designed to protect the camphor industry make for a scenic day-hike, a fascinating overnight hike or a challenging multi-day adventure Maolin District (茂林) in Kaohsiung is well known for beautiful roadside scenery, waterfalls, the annual butterfly migration and indigenous culture. A lesser known but worthwhile destination here lies along the very top of the valley: the Liugui Security Path (六龜警備道). This relic of the Japanese era once isolated the Maolin valley from the outside world but now serves to draw tourists in. The path originally ran for about 50km, but not all of this trail is still easily walkable. The nicest section for a simple day hike is the heavily trafficked southern section above Maolin and Wanshan (萬山) villages. Remains of
RSS