I snapped this photo inside the movie theater where we’re hosting a private screening of INVISIBLE NATION in Taipei tomorrow night. We’re so happy to be back! We love Taiwan!
Here are links to the rest of The Economist’s Drum Tower four episode podcast series on Taiwan. You have to subscribe for these (after being hooked by the first episode I posted last week), but it’s well worth it!
Drum Tower: Can chips save Taiwan?
Tuesday, October 31, 2023
Drum Tower: Would Taiwan fight back?
Tuesday, November 7, 2023
Drum Tower: Can Taiwan preserve its autonomy?
Tuesday, November 14, 2023
Last week, I mentioned that INVISIBLE NATION won an audience award. It was at the Middleburg Film Festival outside of DC and here is the write up on it:
Middleburg enters its ’tweens with aplomb (and more films than ever) The Middleburg Film Festival, which just wrapped its 11th edition, has become a film industry destination during awards season Perspective by Ann Hornaday, Chief film critic, The Washington Post, October 28, 2023
Last week, Filmmaker Magazine published an interview with me, my first for them: “Understanding Taiwan on Its Own Terms”: Vanessa Hope on Invisible Nation by Lauren Wissot in Directors, Interviews on Nov 15, 2023 I say more than I’ve ever said before about myself or our film.
This headline just hit: ELECTION 2024/DPP's Lai picks Hsiao Bi-khim as vice presidential nominee You can see Hsiao Bi-khim in INVISIBLE NATION beginning with her time as a legislator for Hualien through last year when she was Taiwan’s Representative to the U.S. in D.C.
Books about Taiwan, new or old, in English or Chinese:
While I have a long book list to share, this recommendation I’m now eager to read, just came in from Ai-Men Lau who works at DoubleThink Lab which is appropriate because it seems the book may offer perspective on unwinding certain forms of indoctrination. Ted and I were discussing just that subject at lunch today.
From the publisher, University of Washington press:
“In “Good Wife, Wise Mother,” female education and citizenship serve as a lens through which to examine Taiwan’s uniqueness as a colonial crossroads between Chinese and Japanese ideas and practices. A latecomer to the age of imperialism, Japan used modernization efforts in Taiwan to cast itself as a benevolent force among its colonial subjects and imperial competitors. In contrast to most European colonies, where only elites received an education, in Taiwan Japan built elementary schools intended for the entire population, including girls. In 1897 it developed a program known as “Good Wife, Wise Mother” that sought to transform Han Taiwanese girls into modern Japanese female citizens. Drawing on Japanese and Chinese newspapers, textbooks, oral interviews, and fiction, Fang Yu Hu illustrates how this seemingly progressive project advanced a particular Japanese vision of modernity, womanhood, and citizenship, to which the colonized Han Taiwanese people responded with varying degrees of collaboration, resistance, adaptation, and adoption. Hu also assesses the program’s impact on Taiwan’s class structure, male-female interactions, and political identity both during and after the end of Japanese occupation in 1945. “Good Wife, Wise Mother” expands the study of Taiwanese history by contributing important gendered and nonelite perspectives. It will be of interest to any historian concerned with questions of modernity, hybridity, and colonial nostalgia.”
“Notes of a Desolate Man” by Chu T’ien-wen (translated by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin) I read in graduate school in a literature class taught by Carlos Rojas, (who, in small world news, married my previously mentioned friend Kristie Lu Stout’s professor Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, who also teaches literature). The book sits on our shelf in L.A. waiting for someone to borrow it. The author, Chu T’ien-wen is also a famous screenwriter who’s worked with one of Taiwan’s legendary directors, Hou Hsiao-hsien many times, winning many awards on such films as: A TIME TO LIVE AND A TIME TO DIE; DUST IN THE WIND; DAUGHTER OF THE NILE; A CITY OF SADNESS; THE PUPPETMASTER; GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN; GOODBYE SOUTH, GOODBYE; FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI; MILLENIUM MAMBO; CAFE LUMIERE; THREE TIMES; and last but not least, THE ASSASSIN.
In case you missed it,Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien retires from filmmaking, family confirm BY MICHAEL ROSSER 25 OCTOBER 2023
Acclaimed Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien has retired and stopped work on planned feature On The Shulan River, according to a statement from his family. The 76-year-old director had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease prior to work beginning on what was to be his next film but his condition worsened after contracting Covid-19, said the statement.
Side note, for a beautiful, new documentary film about living with Alzheimer’s disease, and memory as a bulwark against dictatorship, see my friend Maite Alberdi’s THE ETERNAL MEMORY. We were lucky to see it last week at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) where INVISIBLE NATION also enjoyed five sold out screenings and moving audience reactions. Maite is the first Chilean woman to be nominated for an Oscar (for THE MOLE AGENT). And of course, see all of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films in which his memories live on!
More about “Notes of a Desolate Man” from Columbia University Press:
Winner of the coveted China Times Novel Prize, this postmodern, first-person tale of a contemporary Taiwanese gay man reflecting on his life, loves, and intellectual influences is among the most important recent novels in Taiwan.
The narrator, Xiao Shao, recollects a series of friends and lovers, as he watches his childhood friend, Ah Yao, succumb to complications from AIDS. The brute fact of Ah Yao's death focuses Shao's simultaneously erudite and erotic reflections magnetically on the core theme of mortality. By turns humorous and despondent, the narrator struggles to come to terms with Ah Yao's risky lifestyle, radical political activism, and eventual death; the fragility of romantic love; the awesome power of eros; the solace of writing; the cold ennui of a younger generation enthralled only by video games; and life on the edge of mainstream Taiwanese society. His feverish journey through forests of metaphor and allusion—from Fellini and Lévi-Strauss to classical Chinese poetry—serves as a litany protecting him from the ravages of time and finitude.
Impressive in scope and detail, Notes of a Desolate Man employs the motif of its characters' marginalized sexuality to highlight Taiwan's vivid and fragile existence on the periphery of mainland China. Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin's masterful translation brings Chu T'ien-wen's lyrical and inventive pastiche of political, poetic, and sexual desire to the English-speaking world.
In 2020, Chu T’ien-wen’s documentary directorial debut UNFULFILLED DREAMS came out.
Seen from a daughter's point of view, Chu Tien-wen turns her parents' stories into a film after having found her father's diary that documents his journey from Nanking in China all the way to Tainan in Taiwan in 1949. Chu comes across her mother's notes on her experience of growing up in a doctor's family in Miaoli as well as the 120 love letters exchanged between her parents.
This book may have been recommended more frequently than any other. From the New York Review of Books:
Winner of the 2018 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize
Set in the post-martial-law era of late-1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile is a coming-of-age story of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan’s most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, this cult classic is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and major countercultural figure.
Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend.
Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.
Happy reading, watching, and listening!
Thanks Vanessa. So much needed perspective!