On the evening of November 26, 2011, director Wei Te-sheng (魏德聖) took the stage at Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards, which are known as the top honors for films from Mandarin-speaking societies including Hong Kong and mainland China. Wei was receiving the best feature film award for his work Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale. “Despite the scale of our production, I know we might not have produced a correspondingly great result,” Wei said in his acceptance speech, expressing a degree of modest “embarrassment” at the high-profile recognition of his new work. “But I promise I’ll make better films in the future to make up for any insufficiency.” Accompanying him on stage were two other central figures in the making of Seediq Bale—Guo Tai-chiang (郭台強), chairman of the Central Motion Pictures Corp., a major investor in the film, and co-producer Jimmy Huang (黃志明), who was also the executive producer of Wei’s previous work, the surprise 2008 hit, Cape No.7.
Seediq Bale claimed several other Golden Horse titles including the prizes for best supporting actor, best original film score and best sound effects, as well as the audience choice award. In addition to such honors, the film was recognized indirectly by Andy Lau (劉德華), a Hong Kong star who won the best leading actor award for his role in A Simple Life. In his acceptance speech, Lau said that he hopes Hong Kong’s film industry, which is suffering a major downturn, could see a comeback like the one that has occurred in Taiwan in recent years. What Lau called a model of cinematic revival can be credited in large part to the huge popularity of Cape No.7. For this tacit compliment, at least, Wei indeed did not have to feel embarrassed at all.
Cape No.7 stands as a landmark achievement in Taiwan’s film industry because it won back audiences for a locally made production. The NT$50 million (US$1.6 million) production garnered around NT$530 million (US$16.8 million) nationwide and became the top-grossing homegrown movie at the time. In 2011, Seediq Bale, an ambitious retelling of a major historical incident, gave another boost to Taiwan’s film industry. Its NT$700 million (US$23.3 million) budget made it the biggest-ever local production. Before Seediq Bale seized its Golden Horse titles, the film—screened as a two-part, four-hour epic in Taiwan—had earned around NT$800 million (US$26.7 million) in domestic ticket sales. The then two major candidates for this year’s presidential election, incumbent Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), both attended Seediq Bale’s outdoor premiere in September 2011 in front of the Office of the President in Taipei. “Seediq Bale can be regarded as a continuation of the cinematic excitement and political energy that Cape No.7 brought to Taiwan,” says Liao Yu-tseng (廖育增), a film critic better known by his pen name Alfredo. “The film is a bold effort, with a scale of production that Taiwan’s film industry could hardly even imagine before now. No less significantly, the film leads its audience through history to take a new look at the Wushe Incident.”
Seediq Bale director Wei Te-sheng, left, and Lin Ching-tai, who plays the role of the older Mona Rudao, during the filming of the movie (Photo Courtesy of Ars Film Production)
Seediq Bale is based on events that took place in 1930 in the village of Wushe, which lies in a mountainous region of Nantou County, central Taiwan. The incident and its aftermath are commonly portrayed as an uprising by indigenous Sediq people against Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945). In fact, Wei’s Cape No.7 also references the period of colonial rule as the narrative switches between a love story set in the final days of the Japanese period and the present, in which a local band is formed to open a concert by a Japanese singer. Cape No.7 plays on local people’s mixed feelings toward their former colonizers, an aspect that has been widely considered as crucial to the success of the film.
Indigenous Point of View
For its part, Seediq Bale seeks to recast the Wushe Incident as an uprising in defense of Sediq beliefs, according to Wei. It also aims to reconcile the two sides to an extent, thereby addressing larger, universal issues of human dignity and self-fulfillment, according to a statement by the director at the 2011 Venice Film Festival Awards, where the film was shortlisted for best picture. In other words, Seediq Bale depicts the 1930 incident more from the point of view of the indigenous people involved than as a “patriotic” rebellion against Japanese oppression. The anti-Japanese, nationalistic view of events has become the standard interpretation for the indigenous revolt since the 1945 power shift in Taiwan from the Japanese to the Kuomintang (KMT) government. While the KMT had experienced intense struggles with Japanese invaders in mainland China, Seediq Bale “presents an angle inexorably slanted toward the indigenous people,” says Stone Shih (石計生), an associate professor who specializes in the sociology of art in the Department of Sociology at Soochow University in Taipei.
For Shih, the distinct indigenous viewpoints in Seediq Bale and its gritty aesthetic that portrays crude battle violence have given rise to what is arguably the first utterly realistic Taiwanese film. The professor considers it a consummate work of art in this respect with its unsentimental representation of the protagonist Mona Rudao, who leads his fellow Sediq tribespeople to kill Japanese “invaders” in an attempt to safeguard the tribe’s cultural values.
A Sediq boy runs to join a battle against the Japanese in a scene from Seediq Bale. (Photo Courtesy of Ars Film Production)
Sediq beliefs held that only a Sediq bale, or “real man,” who had taken an enemy’s head and had the facial tattoo to mark his feat, could pass over the heavenly rainbow bridge after death to rest with the ancestral spirits. In Sediq culture, enemies became friends after death, as once a head was cut off, the enmity dissolved. Under Japanese rule, such “barbaric” acts were forbidden. Moreover, Shih notes that Sediq people were forced to log their former hunting grounds for Japanese construction projects, and that the colonial rulers introduced capitalism to the region, thereby changing the Sediq economy from forms of barter to one that relied on money. The changes led many Sediq people to spend the money they earned on liquor, thus robbing their lives of meaning and dignity, Shih says.
It is such social and cultural conflict rather than ethnic hatred between the Sediq and Japanese peoples that lies at the heart of the film. In fact, the movie devotes considerable time to internal fights among Sediq clans, notably the rivalry between Mona Rudao and Temu Walis—leaders of the Dkedaya Sediq and Doda Sediq respectively.
In an interview in 2011, Wei said that the actions of the Sediq people, including killings, were part of their cultural and religious practices. He defended the level of violence in the film, saying that instead of the sanitized version of events as documented in history textbooks, only graphic realism could tell the story of the Wushe Incident accurately. If the beheading scenes look “cruel,” one should consider whether “civilized” forms of violence, such as dropping bombs that kill hundreds of people, are more or less brutal, he said.
A comic book retelling of the Wushe Incident by Chiu Row-long inspired Wei to make Seediq Bale. (Photo by Huang Chung-hsin)
Film critic Liao Yu-tseng says Seediq Bale highlights the confrontation between the “civilized” and “barbaric” as well as the “historical inevitability” affecting the people involved. Despite some criticisms over the film’s interpretation of events, Liao believes that the work is in essence a painstakingly conveyed sense of Taiwanese consciousness, which is rooted in local land, lineage and history. “It’s a film about beliefs,” he says. “Its motif of Sediq people’s belief in their traditions and Wei’s belief in Taiwanese identity, as well as his belief in film as a means of storytelling, all come together to give undeniable strength to the work.”
Like many other Taiwanese people of his generation, 42-year-old Wei knew little about the Wushe Incident before he read about it as an adult. The director says he never heard the event discussed in detail at school, where, ironically enough, much of Taiwan’s history was absent from history education, which had long focused on mainland China. Wei says it was not until the late 1990s, when he read a comic book by Chiu Row-long (邱若龍) about the Wushe Incident, that he learned the full extent of what happened there. The story led Wei to write the first draft of the film’s script around the same time. He later enlisted Chiu’s help as an art adviser for the film. The director says he was also inspired by the call for indigenous peoples’ rights that was heard as part of broader demands for a more liberal society following the end of decades of martial law in 1987.
In terms of local film traditions, Seediq Bale follows in the vein of the New Wave Cinema movement that emerged in the early 1980s. The movement was a major attempt by filmmakers to compete with the increasing popularity of Hollywood and Hong Kong movies among domestic audiences, who had begun to turn their backs on the locally made melodramas or government-funded propaganda films that were typical at the time.
The release of Taiwan’s biggest-ever film production spawned a number of spin-off books. The book cover in the center shows a historical photo of Mona Rudao, right, and the actor who portrays him in the film, left. (Photo by Huang Chung-hsin)
While the more realistic and introspective New Wave works won international acclaim at major film festivals, they never achieved much commercial success despite initially good results at the box office. Nonetheless, the movement became very influential in shaping Taiwan’s cinematic culture, particularly through its shift to local historical and cultural motifs that drew on the experiences of average Taiwanese people, according to Li Yuan (李遠), a 2011 Golden Horse judge and a central figure in the New Wave movement. The comments from the former screenwriter appear in Jump! Taiwan Films, a collection of articles on major Taiwanese filmmakers published in 2011 by Li under the penname Xiao Ye (小野). Jump! Taiwan Films includes interviews with Wei, Jimmy Huang and Lin Yu-hsien (林育賢), the director behind the documentary Jump! Boys from 2005 and the feature Jump! Ashin, which was released in 2011.
Li says Jump! Boys was one of many documentaries produced during the mid-2000s that heralded a revival of the ideals of Taiwanese New Wave filmmakers. Jump! Ashin became one of the most popular films at local theaters in 2011, with ticket sales of around NT$80 million (US$2.7 million). Other locally made hits were the hilarious, homegrown-style Night Market Hero, which earned more than NT$100 million (US$3.3 million), the campus love story You Are the Apple of My Eye, which took in around NT$400 million (US$13.3 million), and Seediq Bale.
High Tide for Local Movies
Those works helped create the highest tide for locally produced works in the domestic market for at least two decades. Local films contributed 18.4 percent of all box office earnings in Taipei from January to November 2011, according to the Government Information Office, a rise from 7.13 percent and 2.14 percent of earnings by local films in Taipei for 2010 and 2009 respectively. Ticket sales in Taipei are seen as representative of Taiwan as a whole. From 1996 to 2006, local works never earned more than 5 percent of all ticket sales in Taiwan, while the amount was less than 2 percent for most years.
A scene from Seediq Bale presents a younger Mona Rudao, left, on the alert in Sediq hunting grounds. (Photo Courtesy of Ars Film Production)
In a review of Seediq Bale, film director Leon Dai (戴立忍) praised the movie as being made on the largest scale, in the freest creative environment and with the greatest fidelity to historical facts ever in Taiwan’s film history. Dai’s father-daughter story No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti, which means “I can’t live without you” in Spanish, won the 2009 Golden Horse prizes for best director and best feature film. Dai dedicated his best director award to his college teacher, Edward Yang (楊德昌, 1947−2007), a New Wave director and a central creative force behind the movement. Yang is also recognized by his former assistant director Wei Te-sheng as the most influential figure in the young filmmaker’s career. “Seediq Bale represents another roots-seeking movement in the form of film following the 1980s cinematic New Wave,” Dai says. “After a long slump [in Taiwan’s film industry], Seediq Bale is startling in terms of the author’s will and the film’s production values and form of expression.”
In many ways, this startling work is more than just a film. The much anticipated project drew a surge of attention to and discussion of local history and the state of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples. At the same time, its record budget and scale of production reflect recent moves toward making bigger-budget Taiwanese films. During past decades, local works were typically made for less than NT$10 million (US$333,000). In addition to Cape No.7, other recent titles including Jump! Ashin, Night Market Hero and You Are the Apple of My Eye gained investment of more than NT$40 million (US$1.3 million). As the opening scenes of Seediq Bale put it, “A good hunter knows how to wait silently.” The long wait of Taiwan’s film industry finally seems to be paying off.
Write to Pat Gao at kotsijin@gmail.com