Over the past decade, an interdisciplinary skill base has been developing in the field of documentary filmmaking in Taiwan, inspiring creative new approaches to producing high-caliber works. Some of the results of this burgeoning sector were on display at the 2015 Documentary Screening Tour, organized by the Ministry of Culture’s Bureau of Audiovisual and Music Industry Development. The tour brought films to locations all around the country from August to November last year, showcasing a selection of 25 Taiwanese documentaries covering a variety of topics with the ultimate goal of enhancing public awareness of historical events.
With 2015 marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, many of the films screened during the tour were created to elucidate that era. The documentaries gather the memories of Taiwan’s people, acting like a family photo album for the entire nation, with each project aiming to harness the power of the moving image to help Taiwanese better understand their history.
A poster for Attabu II (Photo courtesy of Encore Film)
Following on from 2013’s Attabu, Attabu II continues the tale of the Lin family. Attabu is the indigenous Hoanya people’s name for today’s Wufeng District in central Taiwan’s Taichung City. The Lin family depicted in the film trace their history in Taiwan back to 1746 with the arrival of Lin Shi (林石, 1729-1788), rising in prominence over 210 years until the passing of Lin Xian-tang (林獻堂, 1881-1956) in Japan. During the period of Japanese colonial rule (1895-1945), Lin Xian-tang was a major figure behind the Taiwanese movement calling for greater self-governance, and helped found the influential Taiwan Cultural Association.”
“The history of the Lin family is inextricably linked with Taiwan’s recent past,” says Khan Lee (李崗), producer of the two Attabu films. “And whenever they were faced with big decisions, one wrong step could have led to their demise.” Upon considering the recent past of the nation, Lee began to feel that most Taiwanese are strangers to their history. He thought of how the power of images could inspire local people to investigate their collective historical memory. “As a nation of immigrants, we have to understand Taiwan’s history and get a greater sense of who we are, because only when you know the past can you really face the future,” he says.
When he first started working with director Hsu Ming-chun (許明淳) on the Attabu project, Lee began looking for a way to tell the story of the Lin family. This required bringing together the worlds of academia and filmmaking because “no one side can properly deal with a topic this big,” Lee says. “When you make a historical documentary, you have to make sure to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’ because, in our case, we had to face critical examination from the Lin family, scholars and the political world.”
Before shooting even began on the first film, the team led by Hsu and Lee spent two years poring over historical documents. With the story so sweeping, the original plan was for three films, but the process of securing financial backing was so arduous that the team ultimately decided to tell the story in two parts. Filming the first of the two required Lee to tap into his own funds, nearly bankrupting him in the process. He also spent hours discussing the project with his brother, internationally acclaimed director Ang Lee (李安).
For Attabu II, the producer chose to use a documentary drama format. “We did our best not to let our own viewpoints and emotions color the movie, and we all approached it with a mix of calm and passion, trying to give the audience something to think about,” he says. “We were all very sincere in wanting to inspire critical thinking about history in the next generation.”
A poster for the documentary The Rocking Sky, which explores the experiences of women with connections to the ROC Air Force during World War II (Photo courtesy of CNEX)
Another work that featured prominently in the documentary tour was The Rocking Sky, which is solely focused on the World War II era. The film was distributed by the semi-official General Association of Chinese Culture in Taipei and CNEX, a foundation operating in Beijing, Hong Kong and Taipei that promotes the making of documentaries. To accurately recreate the era, the filmmakers not only collected a significant amount of historical information from both Japan and the U.S., but they also used animation to bring to life the aircraft involved in the conflict.
Director Chang Chao-wei (張釗維) notes, “The war wasn’t just about men. Women also played an important role.” Chang specifically chose to focus on three women who had close ties to the Republic of China (ROC) Air Force, namely Lin Hui-yin (林徽音, 1904-1955), modern China’s first female architect and sister to a downed pilot; Chi Pang-yuan (齊邦媛), the wife of a pilot killed in action as well as a writer and scholar known for her efforts to promote Taiwanese literature; and Xu Xi-lin (許希麟), wife of ace pilot Liu Cui-gang (劉粹剛, 1913-1937). The director embarked on an effort to collect as much of their writing and correspondence as he could, examining how the war impacted the people of the ROC through these women’s eyes.
Over the course of a year and a half’s production work, the crew consulted with nearly 40 veterans and their family members. The premiere, at which President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) was in attendance, was held at Zhongshan Hall in Taipei. The historic building, which was formerly the Taipei City Public Auditorium, was where the Japanese presented an instrument of surrender on Oct. 25, 1945 that formally concluded Taiwan’s retrocession to the ROC.
Chair of the Golden Horse Film Festival Executive Committee Sylvia Chang (張艾嘉), a film director and herself the daughter of an ROC pilot, provided the voice for Lin Hui-yin. Chang remarked that when she read Lin’s elegy to her fallen brother, she was moved to tears in the recording booth on several occasions. The Rocking Sky is not just a tale of the courage of ROC pilots, but also a moving historical epic.
A poster for Song of the Reed, a documentary film about Taiwanese “comfort women” (Photo courtesy of Fanciful Media)
Another of the movies featured in the screening tour was Song of the Reed. Filmed in 2011 and 2012 with the aim of recording the twilight years of a group of “comfort women”—women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese before and during World War II—the documentary premiered on Aug. 14, 2015, 24 years to the day after Korean Kim Hak-sun, herself a victim, became one of the first to speak publicly about the inhumane practice. Director Wu Hsiu-ching (吳秀菁) spent three-plus years producing the film and made an effort to eschew the usual melancholy approach to the issue, instead focusing on the women’s failure in their lawsuit against the Japanese government and how they transformed that defeat into a source of strength. The documentary follows them as they participate in therapy and showcases their positive attitudes as they doggedly pursue justice.
Raising funds for the theatrical release of a documentary can be tremendously challenging. In the case of Song of the Reed, the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation, which has been at the side of these women for two decades, led the charge. Using an online crowdfunding platform, it was able to reach its fundraising target of NT$300,000 (US$9,230) in just over a month, even surpassing it by more than NT$70,000 (US$2,155). The foundation used the money garnered from netizens to pay for the film’s distribution.
One of the most acclaimed documentaries of the tour focuses on life after the war. Following the conflict, the ROC government repatriated the vast majority of Japanese living in Taiwan. These people were known as wansei (Taiwan-born) in Japan and while they held Japanese passports, Taiwan was their home.
The book Wansei Back Home collects the stories of 22 wansei, recalling the lives of the Japanese who worked to develop Taiwan’s east coast, the hardships and discrimination wansei faced upon arriving in their “homeland” of Japan, and their return journeys to Taiwan to seek out the places of their childhoods. The book’s author, Mika Tanaka, herself a grandchild of wansei, spent 12 years collecting stories that took place in both Taiwan and Japan. The project involved 40 interpreters and translators, with Tanaka selling her home to fund the book and its film adaptation. Her only concern was to help these aging wansei find their roots again. In October last year, her book made the transition to the silver screen.
A poster for Wansei Back Home, which follows the journeys of Taiwan-born Japanese back to the places (Photo courtesy of Activator Marketing Company)
Helmed by veteran director Ko I-chen (柯一正) and produced by Tanaka, the movie version of Wansei Back Home captures eight wansei on their return trips to Taiwan. To give added depth to the documentary, the producers combined aerial photography with images from the past, while Tu Du-chih (杜篤之), a Cannes International Film Festival award winner, handled sound effects and Golden Horse-nominated composer Baby Chung (鍾興民) crafted a magnificent score. Over the course of 18 months of editing, the more than 1,000 hours of raw footage was cut down to a 110-minute film full of smiles and tears, hope and love.
Taiwan’s history is bigger than can be told in just a handful of documentaries. Fortunately, despite the difficulties involved, an increasing number of artists have become interested in taking on the challenge. Through these documentaries, audiences can not only better understand Taiwan’s past, but also use the knowledge they gain to make a brighter tomorrow.
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A version of this article originally appeared in Taiwan Panorama.