Tibet, Taipei [Xizang Taibei, 西藏台北]. Dir. WU Mi-sen [吳米森]. PTS [公視]: 2008.

Excellent documentary, very well edited, great footage and well-chosen interviews. Most brilliant choice of interviewee: the advertising executive, asking if he was Beijing, how would he spin the Tibet issue?

Topic is very timely.

The title is more clever than it appears, too. The documentary begins by explaining how there is a Tibet Road in Taipei city. Merely a name, or the embodiment of something else that has been hidden in the unnoticed heart of this local culture, as well?

I did notice that the camera work was quite well done at times -- especially for a digital documentary. Turns out Jake Pollock was a cinematographer here as well!

Teen Patron [Lian jiang, 練將]. Dir. CHOU Yu-hsin [周猷新], HAN Chung-han [韓忠翰], WANG Chen-yu [王振宇]. 台灣影像獨立藝術: 2008.

This would make an excellent double feature with The Gambler's God.

Nicely collected set. All three shorts had something to do with memories, time, and the abstract ways that film is able to collapse present and past into a fantastic, or even ephemeral moment.



The Light in Time [Shi guang, 時光]. Dir. HUNG Pi-wan [洪碧婉]. Perf. Wan Fang [萬芳]. 2009.

"時光一去不回..."

I love this simple little term 時光, but I can't think of an equivalent in English. It appears in a couple Hou Hsiao-hsien films, Three Times (最好的時光) and Cafe Lumiere (咖啡時光), but neither "time" nor "light" alone seems to capture the full idea. Director Hung phrased it well when she spoke of the inspiration for this film. She was experimenting with pinhole cameras, which require a longer exposure time. Such photographs are interesting because they appear to capture a fragmentary moment, but the image is actually comprised of fluid, elapsed time. This film is thus an attempt to explore that dissonance between our snapshot memories or fixed pasts and their ever-changing relationship to the time of now. It's told through the perspective a young woman who returns to her childhood home in the outskirts of Taipei. As she moves through the space of her parents' now-abandoned home, she cannot help but to relive her memories.

A quiet, contemplative film. Each character seems to be compartmentalized in their own times, none of which overlap. Father is injured, so his is a time of suspension. For some reason, granny -- his mother -- still imagines him as a child, infantilizing him and adding insult to injury. Mother is constantly occupied by work, even when she returns home; not a moment of her time appears to be her own. And then there's the little girl who's trying to capture it all through her toy camera...

This was my favorite of the three.

The Vanishing Film [Dai xiao shi de ying pian, 待消失的影片]. Dir. CHOU Tung-yen [周東彥]. Pili Diva: 2009.

Short experimental work based on the writings of Marguerite Duras.

Secret Sea [Mi mi hai, 祕密海]. Dir. CHEN Yu-lin 陳育林. Perf. MO Tzu-yi [莫子儀], JIAN Manshu [簡曼書]. Corsair: 2009.

Four friends -- three guys and a girl, Shushu -- camp out on the beach one night. Something happens that night which changes their friendship forever.

Thanks to previous years' precedents, I kept expecting the Nike logo to appear at the end of this one. I guess any short film shot on digital about young, sporty, good-looking teens is immediately suspect... While this seemed to be a crowd favorite, I have to admit being way too annoyed with the English subtitling to enjoy it. It's littered with gratuitous 'fucks' that are just not in the Chinese original, and gives the impression that the writers/translators were trying too hard to make the dialogue and the characters seem edgier than they were. Also, "jolly comfy"??? "What's with that fury" for "氣什麼"? Who says that?? Overall, I think this short could have done with fewer words and sparser dialogue, as much of it felt stilted and trite. The best moments here were unspoken, like when Shushu manages to convince Mo Tzu-yi's character to give her a piggyback ride, and the wobbly camera captures a glimpse of her beaming smile, braces and all -- a perspective that only the audience is privy to, but none of the guys can see (presumably). I like that this was told as a flashback, a return to a rosy memory. I did not like the use of letters narrated in non-diegetic voiceover to fill us in on what has happened in the meantime -- again, too much telling, when we could have just been shown.

Miao Miao [渺渺]. Dir. CHENG Hsiao-tse [程孝澤]. Perf. Sandrine Pinna [Chang Yung-yung, 張榕容], Ke Jia-yan [柯佳嬿], FAN Wing [Fan Zhiwei, 范植偉]. Block 2/J.A. Media/Jet Tone: 2008.

Miao Miao Fan Zhiwei and director Cheng Hsiao-tse

Scattershot:

1. It was funny to hear director Cheng say he chose Ching-Mei Girl's High School (景美女中) as a shooting location precisely because it has retained the look and feel of an 'old' school. Forty years ago, Pai Ching-jui chose the same high school for Lonely Seventeen precisely because it was new and architecturally modern.

2. Chen Fei is such an irritatingly bad record store owner, I started to become distracted mid-way through the film thinking about how I wanted to kick him out of the story and run the record store properly. Why are guys are always the ones in bands, while girls are forever the recipients of their musical knowledge/expertise or just their lovelorn groupies? This is why Chang Yung-yung's character was so refreshing. She is delightfully impish when she's deliberately messing with him, exposing his tortured facade for the shallow fabrication that it is.

3. Jack Kerouac was not a hippie, and On the Road is not a hippie novel.