Swedish single mom Kicki recently decided to bring her 16-year-old son Viktor to Taiwan on vacation. However, she didn’t tell him that they came here mainly to meet Mr Chang, a Taiwanese man she had been dating online for some time. While Kicki was determined to find the man she fell in love with in cyberspace, Viktor wandered around the streets of Taipei and met 18-year-old Didi, whose friendship eventually led Viktor and his mother on a journey that was beyond their imagination.
The inspiration for a melodrama such as this would have to be ficticious for some people. But for director Hakon Liu (劉漢威), the film Miss Kicki (霓虹心) was actually his own life experience as he grew up dealing with two different cultures.
“My father is Chinese and my mother is Norwegian,” he said. “And doing this kind of culturally half-and-half movie in Taiwan actually feels whole, a full-circle, because I am of two cultures.”
Liu first made his name known in the film community with dozens of short films. One of them, Lucky Blue (幸運藍), won the award for best short film at the 2007 Gothenburg Film Festival.
The creation of Miss Kicki, Liu’s first feature-length project, was not only inspired by cultural differences. It was also inspired by Liu’s memories of his childhood and teenage years.
Liu spent a large portion of his life in Taiwan before leaving for Norway when he was 17. He said the Taiwan he remembered was mostly rural scenes in Pingtung. His family lived beside a bell-fruit orchard with a Taiwan Sugar Corp (台糖) railroad nearby. Close to the railway were some abandoned houses where Liu and his friends would go to take pictures and write graffiti on the walls.
“Taipei in my childhood was a very exotic and expensive place,” he said. “The AsiaWorld Department Store (環亞百貨) was like the most exclusive and luxurious place in town. I thought if I wanted to meet stars like Aaron Kwok (郭富城), I needed to go there.”
He also remembered kids in school pointing at him and calling him a foreigner. Whenever that happened, he would always fire back by calling them Taiwanren (Taiwanese) in Mandarin.
“I think many directors and artists will do what I do, that somehow you can’t avoid childhood,” Liu said. “When I close my eyes and I smell things from my childhood, I get a sense of things, even though I am writing things for a Swedish woman.”
“I would not portray a character without having certain parts of myself in him or her,” he said, adding that they included things that had actually happened and those he made up.
Liu also spent one year studying at an American School in Taichung, where there was a small Norwegian school on the same campus. Liu said memories of living in the school dormitory could be the subject of another film.
“It [the school] was an isolated place with a lot of foreigners and a bunch of rich Taiwanese kids,” he said. “That was when I started falling in love and doing stuff like running out in the middle of the night, stealing motorcycles and giving them back later.”
Working in Sweden now, Liu still returns to Taiwan a couple of times a year to visit his family in Pingtung, where he also hangs out with friends, watches the rice fields wave in the wind, listens to the sound of scooters and enjoys the quietness of the countryside.
Liu is aware of the changes in Taiwan, but he said he was more intrigued by the contrast of old and new, such as the one between Taipei 101 and the shabby hotels in the Wanhua District in Taipei.
About 90 percent of the settings in Miss Kicki were shot in Taiwan, ranging from typical tourist spots like Sun Moon Lake (日月潭) to everyday places like the South Airport Night Market in Wanhua (南機場夜市) or the quixotic UFO houses (飛碟屋) in Sanchih (三芝), Taipei County.
“The story found them [the UFO houses] interesting. I needed that place as a kind of secret hideaway for some youngsters where nobody would see them, where they could have beer and talk about things,” Liu said.
The popularity of the film Cape No. 7 (海角七號), which inadvertently put the township of Hengchun (恆春) in Pingtung County on the map, came to Liu’s attention, although he admitted that he had only seen video clips of the movie.
He said, however, he could see why the movie was a box office success.
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
Cook Islands officials yesterday said they had discussed seabed minerals research with China as the small Pacific island mulls deep-sea mining of its waters. The self-governing country of 17,000 people — a former colony of close partner New Zealand — has licensed three companies to explore the seabed for nodules rich in metals such as nickel and cobalt, which are used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Despite issuing the five-year exploration licenses in 2022, the Cook Islands government said it would not decide whether to harvest the potato-sized nodules until it has assessed environmental and other impacts. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown
STEADFAST DART: The six-week exercise, which involves about 10,000 troops from nine nations, focuses on rapid deployment scenarios and multidomain operations NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct US assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine. The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year. The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration to common defense and
RSS