Taiwanese film fest casts light on tradition
The program of the 12th annual event finds uplift in tumultuous times with stories about ancient art forms, rural life, and renewed cultures
> BY ADRIAN MACK T
he Vancouver Taiwanese Film Festival returns to the Vancity Theatre on Friday (June 22) for its 12th year. Here are three features we liked a lot.
FATHER What an amazing opener. Octogenarian Chen Hsi-huang is the last master of a traditional form of glove puppetry called budaixi, an art passed down to him by his father. This incredibly rich doc manages to encapsulate the tempestuous political history of the dying art form (performed in the once-outlawed Taiwanese language and frequently seized for propaganda use) while getting inside the story of a son haunted by his father’s cruelty. Chen’s ability to animate his dolls with physicality and emotion is breathtaking, while his serenity and passion for budaixi make him intensely sympathetic. But there’s so much going on beneath, in his struggles with protégés—and, briefly mentioned, his own son—and in the larger picture of the sun setting on old ways. Too much to capture in a short review. Just see it. Filmmaker Yang Li-chou will be in attendance. June 22 (6:30 p.m.)
TURN AROUND Bathed in pale summer light and conveyed on the gentle rhythms of the rural township life it depicts, Turn Around focuses on a young teacher, Wang Cheng-chung (a soulful Jay Shih), reluctantly sent to Nantou County, where he wins over an unruly class of teens and pushes them to excel. If there’s a hard centre to it, the film is also full of drunk, broken fathers and an ambient sense of modest dreams dashed. Things to be reckoned with, for sure, but then the 1999 earthquake hits and we’re handed nightmarishly effective scenes of its aftermath. By the time Wang’s class reconvenes in a makeshift new school, half the kids are missing. Don’t fret; Turn Around wants to ultimately lift the viewer, which it does, even if it leaves no cinematic cliché unturned on its way to an improbable, if crowd-pleasing, finale. June 23 (3:30 p.m.)
PAKERIRAN Young student Futing returns to his coastal hometown from Taipei and is told by Mom to partake in the village sea festival, immersing him in Aboriginal language and customs he has otherwise managed to ignore. A scene in which a bunch of elders mercilessly heckle the hapless lad while he tries to serve them wine (there are rules involved here) is kinda funny but mostly painful, stinging anyone who might feel divorced from their own tradition. (A sliding scale, but that’s pretty much all of us.) An equally at-sea newcomer provides Futing with the time-honoured motivation he needs to hang in there: impressing a girl. It’s a concession to conventional storytelling, but the gentle Pakeriran succeeds in all of its modest intentions. June 24 (7:15 p.m.)
Pakeriran,