Awards have been heaped on the documentaries of Lee Daw-ming (李道明), both in his native Taiwan and abroad. But the career of this idiosyncratic filmmaker might never have gotten off the ground if he had not happened to see an ad in the paper.
A teenager Cambodian boy groans and squirms in agony. His fellow refugees gather around, some trying to comfort him while others tend to what is left of his foot. The boy, foraging for edible leaves, had barely gone three meters beyond the refugee camp’s perimeter when he stepped on a land mine.
That is just one harrowing scene from Lee Daw-ming’s documentary film, Beyond the Killing Fields, filmed on the Thai-Cambodia border in 1985 when the region’s refugee problem was just beginning to attract world attention. It was his first professional assignment. Eleven years later, Lee has established himself as one of Taiwan’s top documentary makers with a string of award-winning films and videos to his credit. Ray Jiing (井迎瑞), director of the Chinese Taipei Film Archive, puts this achievement in perspective. “Lee Daw-ming is one of the few pioneers of Taiwan documentaries who have kept to their ideals against all the odds,” he says. “In this society, which is after immediate results and quick returns, documentaries stand little chance. But Lee has kept right on going for ten years now, and that’s admirable.”
Lee, born in 1953, enjoyed a carefree childhood in Hsinchu, northwest Taiwan. Some of his earliest and happiest memories are of visits to the cinema. “I became interested in film as a child,” he recalls, “because my mother loved movies and often took me with her to see them. “It was during his high school days that Lee first developed a serious analytical interest in film, watching as many movies as possible, particularly those of the great Japanese directors Masaki Kobayashi and Akira Kurosawa. He was also deeply into Italian New Realism cinema.
In 1971, Lee won a place in the department of agricultural chemistry at National Taiwan University. Science, however, was far from being his main interest, and before long he was devoting most of his time and energy to a film club that he launched with some friends. Together they organized the university’s first film festival. Lee wrote several introductory articles about the films shown, which included Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring.
These short pieces attracted the attention of the editor-in-chief of Influence magazine, the late Fred Tan (但漢章). While Lee was still a freshman, Tan invited him to join the magazine and write about film. Lee soon found himself churning out some 50,000 to 60,000 words for each quarterly issue, an output that was to increase when the magazine became a bimonthly. This heavy workload forced him to study cinema even more intensively than before. He acquired a solid grasp of film history and theory in the process. But the inevitable downside was that he neglected his studies and had to shift from science to sociology.
During his time at Influence, Lee and a few colleagues drew up a list of Taiwan’s ten worst films. Some of these were love stories, but some were award-winning propaganda pieces about the army or school Iife, produced by the government owned Central Motion Picture Corporation. Taiwan was not then as free as it was later to become, and restrictive martial law provisions still pervaded many aspects of daily life. The furor generated by this list resulted in Lee and his colleagues coming to the attention of Taiwan Garrison Command as potential subversives. They were soon cleared of suspicion, but the magazine did not long survive.
“That was the worst time in Taiwan’s film history,” Lee recalls. “A lot of Taiwanese movies were about the under world, or soppy romances, or martial arts—things that had nothing to do with real life. People in the film circles of that era were biased against students. Unless you were ‘in’ with the film industry crowd, you got no chance to direct features.”
Lee was not “in,” so he decided to go to the United States, where he pursued postgraduate studies in telecommunications at Temple University. But the following year he transferred to the department of film, radio, and television, and it was there that he learned all he needed to know to become an independent filmmaker.
After six years of study, he was faced with a painful decision—should he stay in America, or return to Taiwan? Lee chose to pack his bags and head for home. “I felt that if I stayed, I’d end up doing what other people wanted me to do,” he says. “If I’d done the things I wanted to do, I’d have ended up living as a squatter.”
Lee returned to Taiwan in 1984, to find a society in flux. Things were stagnant on the surface, although invisible forces were stirring. Change came more rapidly than he could have dared hope. Quite by chance, he read in a newspaper that Kuangchi Program Service, a Catholic Church-sponsored media company, was looking for a director to make a film about refugees living in camps on the Thai-Cambodia border. He went for an interview and got the job.
Lee and a small production team spent January 1985 visiting the refugee camps. The footage they filmed was edited into five documentaries, including Beyond the Killing Fields, which reaped the award for Best Short Film at the 1986 Asia-Pacific Film Festival and was named Best Documentary Film at the 1986 Golden Horse Awards. The Chinese Television System edited Beyond the Killing Fields into five episodes. When the series was broadcast in Taiwan, it raised nearly US$750,000 in donations for Thai charities.
This was to be a seminal experience for Lee: a turning point in his career, and also a very tough time in his life. “We only got about four hours’ sleep a night,” he says, “because it took three hours by car to get to the camp and another three hours to come back. The UN wouldn’t allow us to stay overnight. It was very hot. All the refugees wanted to tell their stories, hoping that we’d be able to help them get away. We became a vital channel for them to contact the outside world.”
Random casualties were a constant fact of life. “One day you’d be talking to some refugees and next day, they’d be gone—some were killed and others fled because of the shelling,” he recalls. “It was a highly complex experience. I saw different aspects of humanity: cowardice and selfishness, as well as generosity and compassion. I also saw some reporters who were just out for a sensational scoop. Money and fame, that’s all they were interested in. They were like flies.”
When Lee is asked what has been the most profound influence on him to date, he replies that without doubt it was the making of Beyond the Killing Fields. “The refugees’ perseverance and ability to adapt were extraordinary,” he muses. “They had to build their own shacks and fetch their own water. Kids were born in the camps and grew up there without ever seeing a toilet or water coming out of a tap. Their living conditions were worse than in jails. It doesn’t matter how many films you’ve seen, or how many books you’ve read about such things. Experiencing them personally is something else again. Now that I’ve seen people existing in truly primitive conditions, poverty and death have lost their power to frighten me.”
Chance had already played one important role in Lee’s life. It was to happen again. While visiting a documentary film festival in America, he met Hu Tai-li (胡台麗), a research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Ethnology. Hu wanted to make a film about Taiwan’s indigenous Saisiyat tribe, and she invited Lee to join the project.
The resulting documentary was called Songs of Pastaay. Pastaay is a traditional festival observerd by Taiwan’s indigenous Saisiyat tribe in honor of a legendary race of dwarves who, according to tribal tradition, taught them the rudiments of agriculture and hunting. But then the dwarves made advances to the Saisiyat women, and many of them were killed by the enraged men of the tribe. Some dwarves survived the ambush and put a curse on the Saisiyat. The biennial festival is intended to appease the dwarves’ anger through the offering of sacrifices. The younger members of the tribe are trying to modify the rites in such a way as to make them more attractive to tourists. But this runs counter to the wishes of the tribal elders, who want to maintain the old ways. Songs of Pastaay deals with the resulting conflict.
The documentary won the Gold Special Jury Award at the Houston International Film Festival in 1990. But it failed to capture Taiwan’s Golden Horse Award for Best Documentary, because the jury thought that the film was a compilation of factual material without benefit of artistic treatment. In other words, it was a detached, objective recording. Such reasoning does not convince everyone, including Ray Jiing of the Chinese Taipei Film Archive. “It’s true that Lee has focused on the indigenous peoples,” he says, “but at the same time he’s presenting a series of reflections on society as a whole here. His work is much more than pure recording. He frequently talks to the audience through his choice of subject, images, scene arrangement, and the questions the interviewer poses.”
The jury’s view of Songs of Pastaay does, however, highlight one telling characteristic of Lee’s documentaries—he uses voice-overs rarely, and then only to achieve a specific effect.
Voice-overs were first introduced by the British documentary filmmakers of the 1930s, and the propaganda films of Nazi Germany made frequent use of them. The voice-over quickly became a distinctive feature of documentary filmmaking, but it has its limitations. “Voice-overs are manipulative,” Lee says. “They send you messages that do not necessarily derive from the accompanying images.” He also distrusts their anonymity. “They’re often used by people who want to hide behind the screen while they tell you all sorts of things. That kind of voice-over we call the Voice of God.”
Lee thinks that viewers don’t need the help of voice-overs to follow a documentary, any more than they do to follow a feature film. And anyway, voice-overs are often inadequate to portrary complex ideas. “It’s hard to explain a person’s actions, to encapsulate a whole person in a nutshell,” he says. “You have to look at everything from more than one point of view.” This attitude is something of a reaction against the techniques that Taiwan’s other documentary makers habitually adopt. “Many of them are lazy,” he says. “They use voice-overs to convey messages, to save themselves the trouble of providing images. There’s a Taiwanese saying for that kind of thing: ‘dipping in the soy sauce.’” (To dabble, in other words.)
On the rare occasions when Lee does have to use voice-overs, he tries to give them neutral messages: dates, locations, the people in the shot and what they are doing. He prefers to let interviewees tell their own stories, and deliberately avoids sensationalizing. “What I try to do,” he says, “is present, not necessarily reality, but an honest portrayal that stays true to my own observations.” Ray Jiing admires Lee’s stand. “Lee stands for faithful recording of the people he films and their relations with the environment,” he says. “This is truthful and natural, and his film aesthetics are gradually gaining ground. Other directors are starting to copy his methods. But Lee was the pioneer.”
Toward the end of the eighties, Lee’s gifts caught the eye of the Taiwan’s Public Television Production Unit. This unit was financed out of the Broadcasting Development Fund, sponsored by the Executive Yuan and by profits from commercial broadcasting stations. In 1989, the unit commissioned Lee to make a documentary titled Taiwan in Transition. “It was just one year after the government lifted the ban on licensing new newspapers,” he recalls. “Here was a breath of fresh air in Taiwan—at last.”
The ambitious series was originally conceived in five parts, covering issues ranging through politics, environmental protection, and veterans’ and women’s rights. Lee set up his own workshop, Dimensions Communications, with money provided by his father. Believing that the commissioned project would enable him to break even quickly, he pumped money into buying fancy equipment. But then a change in the political scene rocked Lee’s boat. The defense minister Hau Pei-tsun was nominated by the president to replace Lee Huan as premier.
“Lee Huan had been pretty tolerant of dissent,” Lee says. “But Hau tightened up on freedom of speech, which caused a change of policy over at the Public Television Production Unit. They wanted to kill my project. “Lee had already been filming for about a year, however, and he had no intention of seeing all that money and effort go to waste. He edited the footage into two of the very few documentaries in which he personally retains copyright. One of them was Voice of the People, which dealt with some of the hottest environmental issues in Taiwan at the end of the eighties.
In 1991 Voice carried off the Golden Horse Award for Best Documentary Film, and Lee was named Best Documentary Director. Lee’s face turns mischievous when he talks of his moment of glory. “I got to make an acceptance speech, and Premier Hau Pei-tsun was there, so I said, ‘Economic development may be important, but the government should be paying more attention to environmental issues.’ I looked straight at Hau, and he just made a face.”
After Voice of the People, Lee began to concentrate on the indigenous tribes. He has made several more documentaries about them, including Life of Sakuliu and Villages Forever. Life of Sakuliu profiles Paiwan artist Pavavalung Sakuliu, who has devoted himself to the renaissance of Paiwan tribal culture, presently under threat of total assimilation by Christian and Chinese mores. Villages Forever is a TV documentary series about the revival of indigenous culture, commissioned by Chinese Public Television Organizing Committee.
Lee’s work on Taiwan’s indigenous tribes has been a key factor in bringing his name before the public and keeping it there. Why has he devoted so much of his professional life to this? “It’s all about distribution of resources,” he says. “There are so few resources for documentary making in Taiwan, and I feel I should use them on what most concerns the locals. I should document what is the most underrepre sented, that is the indigenous people, the underclass of Taiwan society.”
Lee believes that historical coincidence rather than cultural superiority has led mainlanders and their descendants to dominate Taiwan’s political and economic scene. He is currently working on a big project that he hopes will prove his point. In Tracing the Austronesian People in Taiwan, Lee plans to trace the origins of the island’s indigenous peoples and explain their interactions with the Chinese immigrants and Westerners who once colozined the island.
Lee makes very little money from his documentaries. His workshop has been in the red since its foundation in 1989, and he has had to use his apartment as collateral for a bank loan. How does he survive? Ray Jiing thinks that he keeps going by maintaining very high standards. “Lee is a fair man,” he says, “but he’s also incredibly demanding. Very disciplined. He insists on his crew being fully prepared before shooting starts, and once a documentary is under way they have to be extremely precise to satisfy him. He’s very demanding of himself, too. Without that discipline, it would be impossible to survive in such an unfriendly environment.”
Does Lee believe that his documentaries have made a difference to society? His ultimate aspiration is to make a film like the extraordinarily influential Dancing with Wolves, but he recognizes that at present that day is a long way off.“Take Voices of Orchid Island," he says.“It won the 1993 Golden Horse Award for Best Documentary, but did very little to improve the situation on Orchid Island [where nearly all of the indigenous Yami tribe live]. Actually, I knew that would be the case before I started filming. Not many people watch documentaries, so their effect is bound to be limited. Even when we showed the film in tribal villages, very few people actually came to watch it. They preferred to stay home and watch TV."
No money, and little practical effect—so what makes Lee tick? The director thinks for a moment.“Well," he says eventually.“You've just got to make the effort. That's all."