 Greetings, everyone. Welcome to the Taiwan Post-New Wave Cinema series. I'm Bi Zhang, the Deputy Director of the Center of Taiwan Studies at SOAS. It is our great pleasure to welcome Dr. Christopher Brown to talk about one of Taiwan's major directors, Zheng Youjie, and also who's the focus of this week. As many of us know about this, that there has been abundant of academic research on Taiwan New Wave and the important authors associated with it. And yet academic research on what has followed is few and far between. When we planned the series early this year, we came across Dr. Brown and his work. You know, it's rare, fine, I have to say, because not many people really write specifically about younger generation directors. Dr. Brown is an academic as well as a filmmaker. He is senior lecturer in filmmaking at the University of Sussex. He has written on Taiwan's cinema, especially the Post-2008 Cinema and also covered topics like film practice as research and many more. He is also the academic consultant for Queer East, a festival we are actually quite familiar with. The festival showcases South and East Asian LGBTQX, sorry, plus films to the UK audiences. Most of all, we're really looking forward to his forthcoming books on recent Taiwanese cinema. And maybe Chris can come back for another round and introducing his new book next. So his talk today focuses on Zheng Youjie, right? And this talk provides a kind of overview of Zheng's work, including Do Over, In Nian Zhi Chu, 2006, and Yang Yang, 2009, and his television series, Days We Stare at the Sun.他們在毕业的前一天爆炸, 2010. And of course, one of the films we are really familiar with as so was, we have shown this three times, Wa Wa No Sido, Tai Yang Hai, 2015, and so on. So Dr. Brown looks at Zheng Youjie's cinematic approach in representing multiple and multi-layered and often contradicting sort of identity and also mapping the contested concept of space and place. Before we formally start the talk, I would like to thank our funder, as usual, the Minister of Culture, Taiwan, and also the Cultural Division at a TRO in the UK. Please be aware that this session is recorded. Please turn off your audio and video to make sure the quality of the recording. We will start to take questions 30 minutes into the session. And our assistant curator, Shaoyi, what made the announcement when the chat function is open? Could you please post only one question at a time at most two and keep them succinct and also relevant to the topic, Chris's topic? Shaoyi will collate those questions and present it to him. So without further ado, welcome, Chris. The floor is yours. OK, so thank you very much. Really pleased to be here. In this talk, I'm going to provide an overview of Zheng Youjie's work focusing on his feature films, Do Over, Yang Yang, My Little Honeymoon, and Wara No Sidao. I'm also going to look at his short film, Unwritten Rules, as well as his TV series, Days We Stare at the Sun. So I'm going to start today by looking at Zheng's thematic preoccupations, questions of stylistic consistency, and then his focus on performance. But what I'm hoping to do is to set the scene by talking about these things for the main focus of the talk today, which is on mapping, approaching the director's films in terms of mapping. So like his contemporaries, whose work has been showcased at SOAS these past three weeks, Zheng began making films after the new Taiwan cinema and its second wave had finished. And he operates in a very different industrial context to those movements. Following the runaway success of Wei Disheng's caped number seven in 2008, the industry is far more commercial in orientation. And it's worth pointing out that at a personal level, this entails pressures and disappointments. We often talk about this in the abstract. But over the last decade, several of his feature films have fallen apart at the last minute due to funding problems. He's really persistent, however, in his proven versatile directing feature films for cinema release, as well as a TV movie, short films, music videos, and two runs of a TV series. This year, he's received a lot of industry recognition for his latest film, Dear Tenant, which reunites him with actor Malti, who earlier appeared in Do-over by the beginning of his career. Both of them, as well as the film, have been nominated at the Golden Horse Awards this year. So we'll have to see if any of them win next weekend. The film's currently on release in Taiwan, though not here in the UK yet. So I won't, I'm afraid, be covering it today. So as I said, I'm going to begin by talking a little bit about themes and a style of his work. Jen's work can productively be approached in terms of his thematic preoccupations. Central to him are the identities of marginalized characters who feel caught between cultures and face multiple forms of discrimination. There's the illegal immigrants from Thailand in Do-over, the mixed-race protagonist of Yangyang, the Vietnamese housewife in My Little Honeymoon, the indigenous tribe in Hwa-Wen-Oh Sidao, and the gay widower in Dear Tenant. These characters find themselves at the intersection point of multiple axes of injustice. The director's characters are all culturally hybrid in one way or another, and their experiences expose tension points and contested notions of a national identity. So for instance, in Do-over, the character of Ding An enters Taiwan with the help of a criminal gang who forced him into a life of crime, effectively holding hostage with the promise of an ID card that never actually materializes. And in the film, the character literally has to fight to obtain his ID card, a symbol of belonging, but one which is ultimately shown to be a hollow one. Some of Jen's protagonists are not Taiwanese and the subject is to discrimination for this reason. Others are Taiwanese but suffer from historic structural discrimination. For example, the indigenous community in Hwa-Wen-Oh Sidao whose ancestral land rights are threatened. I think in his earlier films, at least, these representations of exclusion are rooted in Jen's own experiences. So he's the son of a Taiwanese mother and a Japanese ethnically Chinese father and grew up in a bilingual household. It was only at school that he learned Mandarin for the first time. Around his first year in elementary school, he experienced bullying due to his Japanese heritage and was transferred to another school. After that, he tried to conceal his background for a while. For example, he wouldn't allow his dad to visit the new school. Jen has spoken about how prior to making films, he constantly felt the need to prove his Taiwanese identity. The director himself is undoubtedly reflected, I think, in some of his earlier protagonists. Yang Yang's hybrid heritage causes her to internalize a range of external pressures while languages use a debt directly represented in My Little Honeymoon. Within Chong Er's household, each family member prefers a different mode of communication. She prefers to speak Vietnamese, her husband Mandarin, the mother-in-law Hokkien and the child doesn't actually speak at all. All of Jen's work dramatizes the unsustainable containment of pressure. Characters who simply snap when faced with overwhelming difficulties and odds. With varying degrees of success, they take a stand against the society that has wronged them. And this is articulated through some recurring visualizations, such as the slide here. So we've got characters blocking roots with their arms outstretched. We see that quite a bit. That said, though, apart from a few motifs, I think it's difficult, actually, to find much stylistic consistency in Jen's work. And this is also true, I'd say, of many of his contemporaries, certainly when we compare them to the work of earlier Taiwanese authors, whose stylistic signatures are readily apparent. In the case of Do Over, for example, Jen cites a diverse range of influences, including Christoph Kajalski, Jim Jarmusch, sorry, and Quentin Tarantino. Kajalski's film Blind Chance was one of the first films that the director saw at a film festival. And Do Over makes similar structural use of three successively told stories which were affected and indeed changed by a common incident. Moreover, when Ding An fights his way out of the gangster's building, the legacy of Tarantino is visible, especially his Kill Bill films. The film features an impressively staged sequence shot from behind the head of the character with single take, as he's repeatedly assaulted by a group of thugs, but somehow summons the energy to fend them off. The film has a dazzling set of visual devices on display, including footage taken on an MP4 videophone, strobe lighting scenes, and frequent use of bold-colored low-key lighting, as we can see in the shot here. Yet each of Jen's other films are quite different stylistically. Yang Yang is far more pared down. His shaky handheld camera work owes a stylistic debt to the aesthetics of documentary, cinema verite. You could trace this back to the traditions of the French New Wave or American indie practice, ranging from John Cassavetes to Spike Lee. Mind it all, Honeymoon and Wara No Sidao, on the other hand, are far more classically shot and lit and edited in a far less frenetic manner, though the latter does accommodate some long takes designed to capture the activities of non-professional actors. Consistency of style, though, has never been a priority for Jen, who instead, tailors this to fit the story, the format, and the type of audience he's looking at. Nor has he identified with any particular genre, although he's proven adept at blending and breaking genres. Do-over transitions from a crime thriller to an art house drama to pretty much a stoner movie by the end. The first series of Days We Stare at the Sun is a genre breaker that commences as a high school teen drama, but then evolves into an insistent critique of the social, economic, and political pressures facing a young teenager. And the final episode is, in this respect, bloody and subversive on many levels. One thing that Jen's films do have in common, however, is an insistent focus on the act of performance. Now, how that's expressed might vary in different pieces of work, but it's in performance that we can see the director's most clearly defined, consistent and self-reflexive preoccupation. More precisely, his work might be said to focus on the differences between performance and performativity. Though it's worth saying that Jen himself does a quote for two, recalling an acting coach who he says, quote, that everyone in every minute is performing. The only difference between actors and normal people is that actors perform at a conscious level, but normal people do it subconsciously. The director's characters challenge the roles that society requires them to literally or figuratively act out. One explanation for this is that Jen himself is an actor. So those of you who watched the Lin Xu series last week will have seen that he appears in The Pain of Others in a central role. He's also in Winds of September and he's got many other credits, Spidey Lily's, Design Seven Love, The Village of No Return, and a load of TV credits and other films as well. So it's perhaps unsurprising, given his firsthand experience as a director, all of his work emphasizes acts of performance and then mediation and often in a self-reflexive manner. So do-over is to a large extent a film about filmmaking. It opens up a film set with a character of Xiaopang stopping traffic and laying tracks with Dolly, then later standing in as a double during a love scene. In My Little Honeymoon in Chong Er's Plight is visualized in highly theatrical terms. She puts on a brave face following a false accusation and she begs her husband and mother-in-law to be understanding. But the minute she's out of their sight, she starts crying. The family home in this sense becomes a stage and she breaks down when she's out of view of the audience, which is kind of what they are there. In Wabanose Dao, the people from the tribe are shown dressed in traditional costume performing dance shows for tourists in a conscious display of self-exoticization. If this is represented in kind of ambivalent terms, then at the level of filmmaking itself, the approach to performance is far more empowering. So most of the cast and non-professionals, locals, who are in many cases re-enacting fictionalized versions of events in which they themselves participated. The film dramatizes a real-life incident in which corrupt land requisition led the villagers to stage a demonstration in the fields. Perhaps Jen's most striking statement on the nature and complexity of performance comes in Yang Yang. The character of Zhang Xinyang is a young mixed-race woman whose mother is Taiwanese and whose absent father is French. She experiences the pressure of performance both as a track sprinter and later as a model and an actress. The film returns incessantly to her athletic training and physical prowess. Her stepfather, who's also the coach, stands at the side of the athletics track with a stopwatch noting the time it takes her to run a lap, barking advice and orders. The director said that in some senses, athletes and actors are alike in that they spend their lifetime preparing for the stage, as he put it. When Yang Yang begins her career in modeling and commercials, the pressure she feels at being asked to perform is explicitly linked to her mixed-race identity. Her agent knows that in the entertainment industry being a mixed-cells, and Yang Yang is potentially bankable talent. A shot in which she inserts blue contact lenses to conceal her brown iris, strikingly confirms how her beauty is conceived in racialized terms. Blue eyes are preferable for a local audience and when she appears in the first film, her hair has also dyed slightly brown too. So ironically, to succeed in the Taiwanese entertainment industry, even Yang Yang must become just a little bit whiter. This is captured by the film's poster which shows the pressure that she feels in performing this ideal of beauty. She stares numbly ahead the top half of her iris blue and the lower half brown, as you can see there. Her body has become a hybrid mask. This emphasis on the performative qualities of gender and sexuality is assisted by the structure of the narrative which prominently features one male character in each half, two different types of masculinity use performative qualities the film ultimately lays bare. Throughout the director's work, the pattern is similar. Marginalized characters are asked to perform to play the role expected of them in order to conform to cultural norms that are shown to be hypocritical, corrupt, and illusory. When I interviewed the director a few years ago, I asked him about the scene in Waranose Dao in which the locals dance for tourists. I put it to him that all of his films seem to be about people putting on a show for others as I've just suggested. And what I wanted to do here was to see if he would draw attention to his own, or parallels with his own work as an actor. So I asked him, was he interested in the theme of performance because he also works as an actor. The response was a little surprising in a way because I've been thinking of the biographical but instead he referred instantly to the national. Now, I don't think so. I think it's because it's part of real life. Everything is, everyone is basically pretending. The difference is whether you do it consciously or not. I have this feeling in fact that everyone is pretending to the extent that this whole island is pretending as the Republic of China. You know, our name is the Republic of China but to be honest, we're Taiwan. We're pretending we represent China. So I think our country in a certain way is based on an illusion. We can see these ideas articulated in his earliest work. So in do over Ding and questions why he tried so hard to get into Taiwan given what he considers to be its artificiality, fake passport, fake money, fake dignity, he says. Is there anything real or was this never a real country? The implications are fairly clear and explain Jun's insistent fixation on acting and pretence. He considers nationhood itself to be something performative. Questions of the national are central to his work as director. And this is something that's even suggested by the English name of his production company, Filmosa, which is a pun on Formosa, Taiwan's historical Portuguese name. Yet in mounting a critique of Taiwanese identity and those whom it marginalizes, his films and TV can never the less be seen to map the island out as a distinctive environment. His work in this sense doesn't reject ideas of nationhood but instead it remaps them. In order to explain what I mean by this, I'd like to turn to Unwritten Rules which is one of the director's short films, a comedy included in the 2012 compilation 10 plus 10 which is itself an interesting project as it showcases the work of several filmmakers who later achieve prominence. So in Unwritten Rules, a group of filmmakers attempt to shoot a scene whilst avoiding the enormous national flag that's attached to the wall in their ill-chosen location. The flag can't appear in the film for fear of making it unsellable in mainland China. So the director orders his crew to remove it. Jun himself perhaps has fewer compunctions about this when compared to his contemporaries. James Uden notes the conspicuous absence of the ROC flag in the comedies, You Are the Apple of My Eye, The Wonderful Wedding and Our Times, all of which were commercial ventures that achieved box office success in the mainland market. By contrast, most of Genuine Chair's films feature the national flag at some point as does his TV series, though no instance is its use, especially patriotic. In Yangyang, the flag flutters over the athletics ground where the protagonist trains, which is ironic given that Taiwanese athletes can't internationally compete under this flag, but instead under the emblem of Chinese Taipei. And this topic is completely openly discussed in the second series of days we stared at the sun. So I'm just gonna play a short clip from the film now to show you what happens as the crew decide to remove the flag. So as the flag's torn away, the director realizes to his horror that something worse lies underneath. An old map of the Republic of China, a full greater China that incorporates the mainland and Taiwan and other regions. The old map is viewed by the young filmmakers with horror and embarrassment because it represented, of course, a geographical fiction. Paradoxically a state without territory, the Republic historically laid claim to the mainland only through maps without having any actual control there. But if earlier filmmakers were asked to endorse this kind of fiction and faced actual censorship, then here Jen suggests that contemporary filmmakers with an eye to the Chinese market engage in self-censorship. These are the unwritten rules of the film's title. But behind the mockery here is a serious point, the questions of how filmmakers should negotiate the industrial geopolitical realities of the more commercial environment post 2008. It's interesting that in unwritten rules, the director uses a map as a focus for questions of nationhood. The maps are instruments of power as much as a representation of the Earth is by now well established and maps are central to any construction of nationhood. But in the case of Taiwan, their role is particularly acute given the island's contested status. Biyu Zhang has examined how the KMT sought to legitimize their regime in post-war Taiwan by asserting strict control over cartography, doctorating school children and deterring the public from reading, boning and using maps outside of classroom and military settings. She argues that this had a profound impact on the generation's perspective on their environment. Taiwan became deprivileged in the national imagination, resulting in people having a lack of intimate knowledge of their locality or any affection for it, a distorted sense of place. This began to change from the mid-80s as tourism and democratization led to an increased availability of maps. Review regulations were formally abolished in 2004 after which the Ministry of the Interior discontinued maps that incorporated mainland China and began to publish only maps of the Taiwan region instead. In other words, a new kind of filmmaking emerged in Taiwan at around the same moment that an outdated form of mapping disappeared. The year is around 2004 to 2000 and that's the first part of the 21st century. And what I'd like to suggest is that the two phenomena are linked and that recent Taiwanese cinema can be seen to represent a new form of mapping, a concerted effort to chart the island as a distinctive environment. Like map makers, filmmakers creatively interact with the national, offering a historically situated interpretation of physical geography. An aerial map of an island may be etched in our minds as being Taiwan, but a map is not the same as a nation. And in certain contexts, aerial maps of Taiwan offer a way of asserting national pride and distinction without attracting the political controversy associated with the flag. So the recent film, The Gangs, The Oscars and the Walking Dead is a case in point. The appearance of a map of Taiwan in a crucial scene in this crucial location and it appears again and again, serves no obvious narrative or thematic purpose, but it's constantly there on screen and in the background, reminding us of where the film is set. Like much of the rest of the film is cheerfully gratuitous. Cape number seven is seen as a turning point in Taiwanese film history, the point of which a new type of cinema emerged and numerous critics have explored the ways in which it presents Southern Taiwanese and Taika identity in a distinctive manner. The film itself resulted in the production of maps too. So it led to a tourist craze in Hongchun where the action was shot with maps produced so that tourists could visit the locations and as the advertising campaign put it, find the address of love. So there's another sort of key to this and it's sort of on the map on the left, it indicates where particular scenes are and you can match them up to the pictures on the next page and on the right we've got a map there that's signed by the stars in one of the locations. But if Cape number seven was an important symbol, I think it consolidated rather than generated what I'm referring to as a new interest in cinematic mappings of the island. In the years preceding its release, a number of films appeared which evidenced these new preoccupations. Do Over was one of these. Others were Island Attude, The Most Distant Course, Exit number seven, Godman Dog and Da Yu, The Touch of Fate. Maps appear in many of these films while mapping as a concept is a central concern. In Da Yu for example, maps appear three times in the film. First, when the teenage runaway Da Yu must decide whether to begin a criminal lifestyle by pickpocketing for the first time. Waiting at a newly constructed bus stop, he stares at the route map while his older mental cautions him that there's no turning back once he starts down this path. The map captures a defining moment in the kid's life, his decision to embark on a rite of passage from which he'll be unlikely to return. A second map appears in the estate agency where Da Yu's mother works. Her job is to sell newly built apartments which he advertises to clients using a map, indicating the proximity of the real estate to future MTR stations and future commercial districts that haven't been built yet. So the map here confirms the ongoing redesign of the city around its relatively new expanding MTR network. And by omission, the effacing of older neighborhoods that the new residential complexes that she's selling will replace. Finally, there's another map when the police chief consults a map of Taipei while a cellular phone call is being traced which sets in motion the climatic encounter between the police and the gangsters. So the three maps in the film help shape plot, characterisation and context, indicating how the city and its inhabitants are being reshaped by new transport and technology networks. In analysing the film in this way, I'm drawing on cartographic approaches to film studies as articulated in seminal works by Julianne Bruno and Tom Connolly and subsequently by others such as Les Roberts. This approach tends firstly to theorise the appearance of maps on screen within films and secondly to approach cinema itself as a form of mapping. For example, exploring historical and conceptual connections between filmmaking and cartography or the presentation of geography on film or the effective emotional qualities of screen journeys. Film studies scholars reconfiguration of mapping has productively challenged cartographers to rethink their discipline. Yet it's largely been undertaken with reference to European and American traditions. This ironically replicates the oversight of an earlier generation of cartographers. In a series of seminal chapters published in the history of cartography in 1994, Cordell Ye challenges 20th century critics who have tended to appraise Chinese maps in relation to quantitative Western models emphasising scientific and mathematical measureability. The emphasis he places on the Chinese tradition of mapping as accommodating subjectivity, relativism and emotion to a perhaps greater extent than Western models seems to pre-empt some of the formulations of film cartography that would emerge a decade later. Mapping is acutely important in the context of China's contested territorial claim over Taiwan. So it does seem an omission that there's not really been a consistent comprehensive attempt to consider Taiwanese cinema in these terms in terms of cartography. The exceptions tend to focus on case studies and on the earlier auteurs of the new Taiwan cinema. For example, there's Frederick Jameson's case study of Edward Young's terrorisers titled Remapping Taipei. Constructions of space have certainly been discussed in relation to the auteurs of the new Taiwan cinema, but rarely in relation to maps and mapping, though occasionally some of the references here show. For example, there's been interest in the scene in Rebels of the Neon God, in which Xiao Kang's blood drips onto a map of a textbook. Mapping tends to be referenced only obliquely in relation to later cinema. For instance, in studies of the island circuit films like Island Atude, which feature characters traveling around Taiwan's coastal circumference. These films have also been explored by critics. Returning now to Chen Youqiu, several of his films feature maps on screen. Conley argues that maps of this type help underline, he says, what a film is and what it does, but also bring into view a site where a critical and productively interpretive relation with film can begin. In My Little Honeymoon, comes across a map at a roadside food stand after she runs away from the town of Menong, where she lives with her husband, taking her daughter on a road trip. Just gonna play a brief clip of the scene in which she comes across the map. The map here serves several functions. So firstly, it situates the story within a real life environment with a reasonable degree of accuracy. The mother and daughter take a route that is possible to travel in real life, while later locations appear sequentially as they drive, as they would if we were taking a trip on this route in real life. But the film's mapping is also effective. So up until this point, Chong'e has been stuck in Menong, a hacker district which is located inland, roughly equidistant from Gaoshuang in Tainan. We learn she's barely traveled around Taiwan at all. It's her daughter's art teacher, an indigenous woman named Mingchen, who broadens her horizons having traveled extensively. She also teaches her how to drive and her to become friends. This teacher subsequently moves to Taidong and later when Chong'e runs away and begins exploring the island for the first time, she decides to visit her friend. The film here resembles the kind of emotional cartography discussed by Juliana Bruno, specifically what she terms tender mapping, drawing on Madeleine de Scudovie-Cadre-Pay-de-Tonde, a work which made a geographical documentation of relational space in the form of a map by which women might navigate interpersonal relations. She argues that this tender mapping later crossed into film. And in this context, we can understand the resonance of Taidong on the roadside map. You are here at this date, she is here and the camera movement anticipates where she will be. It moves diagonally up to the right, following her gaze in the point of view shot, as she mentally charts a course to her friend in Taidong. The city is represented in pretty utopian terms and her journey there is tenderly mapped, an effective route of empowerment. However, I'm also interested in what happens when the map appears. While Chong'e is looking at it, her daughter accepts two free plates of food from the guy who owns the roadside food stand. The mother's immediate instinct is to reject this gift from a stranger. And we know from earlier scenes that her proud husband would consider this to be shameful. But the stall owner urges her to accept it, saying that otherwise the food will go to waste. The map affirms this ethos at a figurative level. For in deciding at this moment to travel to Taidong, Chong'e acknowledges her desire for sustainability. This is in line with how the film as a whole is structured around a central metaphor of environmental balance. It's first half has the couple spraying their crops with pesticide. This causes Chong'e to have health problems with historical undertones. Her mother-in-law makes offensive comments about the use of defoliant during the Vietnam War. Chong'e's problem is literally and figuratively her environment. So it's telling that in the second half of the film, the couple switched to organic farming methods, which helps set the narrative context for her actions there, her embrace of a form of sustainability that is as much emotional as it is environmental. Waonu Sidao features several maps and focuses attention on traditions of counter mapping. Jent co-directed the film with Legal Shumi, an indigenous filmmaker whom he met while researching another project. He said that the film's main reference point is Legal's documentary Wish of the Ocean Rise, which is about his mother's role in restoring a paddy field. In the film, Panae quits her job as a journalist in Taipei to return to her children and ailing father, who live in the village of Makudai on the East Coast. Overseeing the restoration of her tribe's derelict paddy fields, she comes into conflict with developers who are seeking to build a hotel complex on the tribe's land. The film dramatizes the tools of mapping at work. We see a land survey taking place on a woman's paddy field that developers have acquired with the assistance of corrupt officials. It's being surveyed in preparation for the construction of a tourist car park. The activity we see taking place, the acquisition of data through the scientific measurement of distance and topography is the raw material that will be used to produce a map. Prior to this, we've also seen a state agent, Shenzhen, for photographing Panae's land from multiple angles, acting on behalf of Chinese clients who are seeking to develop tourist facilities in the area. Jokes are made about the value of the Yuan with the apparent suggestion that the mainland is informally territorializing Taiwanese indigenous land. And in this sense, we need to bear in mind that mapping never simply reflects reality that seeks to bring it into being. As Tongchai Winichakal's classic study of Siam and the construction of Thai nationhood demonstrates. Maps first appear in the film in a critical scene in the estate agent's office when Panae's daughter, Nakao, decides to sell her family's land. He tells her that she's underage, but then finds a way to facilitate it anyway. Their conversation is filmed in a series of shot reverses in which behind each character, a map of the local area can be seen. We later realize in the latest scene that there's maps all over the wall of the office. These are all aerial renderings designed for official purposes offering a rationalized and apparently objective overview of local territory. The estate agent and the developers acquire power through their ownership and management of maps. Behind his shoulder, on the right there, we can see a map of the region divided with clear, stark, bold boundary lines into discrete divisions. This type of map conflicts with indigenous spatiality, which Robin Roth argues tends to produce multiple overlapping and flexibly bounded territories which defy easy representation into neatly delineated polygons. In 2001, Sai Buwen and Lui Yol Ching were invited by the Council of Indigenous Peoples to assist on a project to map traditional indigenous territories. This was launched following Chen Shui-bian's victory in a 2000 presidential election. Members of three tribes from the Ataial Truco and Paiwan ethnic groups participated and were asked to map and visualize their environments using GIS 3D virtual environment technology. Counter and community mapping of this type challenges hegemonic notions regarding to whom, particular terrain does or should belong. But it's also been seen to have unintended effects, including increased conflict, privatization of land, and increased state regulation. But Roth doesn't see these effects as the inevitable outcome of mapping per se, but rather as the result of a dominant conception of space that frames the cartographic representation of indigenous territories, whereby complex spatiality is rendered as abstract space. In Waouanose Dao, we see community mapping depicted on screen, while the film itself could be said to adopt the form of a counter map, challenging abstract notions of spatiality and instead emphasizing the lived environments of the inhabitants. In deciding to restore the paddy fields, Panai holds a meeting of the local community and presents an irrigation plan, the restoration of the fields. This is in effect a counter map, her vision for a sustainable community that differs from the official maps we see in the estate agent's office. It's informally drawn, it's not necessarily to scale, it's multi-perspectival. It identifies locations not exclusively from an aerial view, but by using pasted, situated photographs and drawings, which encourage emotional identification. Panai is aware of her audience, however, and when applying for a subsidy and a presentation to academics and funders, she uses an aerial photograph, imagery that this particular audience is more likely to relate to. She co-ops the tools of aerial survey of objectivity to suit her community's own purposes. The editing, moreover, makes the relationship between the map and the film map apparent. As Panai delivers her presentation, the jagged rocky edges of the Fengbin coastline are visible on a projection behind her. The editing then cuts to a shot of exactly the same rocks, except this time filmed from a situated perspective and as we see the grandfather, her father, looking out to sea. So I'll just play a brief clip of that edit. So the meaning of the edit seems to be clear. Maps and aerial views of landscape rely on the pretense of accuracy, objectivity, but they disregard how land might be experienced and felt and understood by those who inhabit it. Jen and Lagal are careful not to draw too far to dichotomy, however, making it clear that the loss of ancestral land is not solely the responsibility of outsiders. Neurotransnational flows portrayed as inherently negative, as demonstrated by the viral YouTube video of Nakao's protest that ultimately saves the community. There's also a degree of ambivalence in some of the production design in Panai's home, which again involves a map. If you look carefully at the top right then against the wall, you can see that there's a globe, a map of the world that's evocatively placed alongside a European ship and nearby is also a picture of Jesus. These objects, the map, the means, the message allude to colonial travel and conquest, the historical effacing of local indigenous culture. But it also signals the integration of Christianity into tribal communities where it remains a source of profound spiritual meaning. The religion has apparently shaped the perspective of Panai's family. When Nakao stands in front of the digger with her arms outstretched in the climactic scene, this recalls Christian iconography of martyrdom. Referring to the reception of the film, the director has this to say. When we screen the film in Taipei, many people considered it to be very remote as if the story belonged to another country. Some people didn't even believe that what they saw had really happened. However, back in Hualien and Taidong, people responded to it very positively. This kind of feature film, that is a commercial film shot from an East Coast perspective, focusing on Hualien and Taidong is rare. Other films have been shot there, but they're still from the perspective of Taipei. They do not offer a genuinely local perspective. So this, along with things like the editing decisions I've just discussed, point towards filmmaking itself as a practice of mapping. Certainly, his comments tell us something about how the film was received, but equally they indicate his intentions. The two directors wanted to map out the East Coast on film from a local Indigenous perspective. For Dennis Wood, maps are fundamentally propositional and map makers, as he puts it, extraordinarily selective creators of a world, not the world, but a world, whose features they bring into being. Filmmakers arguably have something in common with this. Jun's films, like many of his other contemporaries, are propositional in this way. In mapping out the island, filmmakers bring into being the features of a nation that might be. The director's work certainly covers a lot of space, both individually and taken in composite, while travel is a significant theme and form. In Do Over, it often feels as if the director is trying to offer a cross-section of environments within Taiwan, facilitated by the character's movements from place to place. In the first major storyline, Ding An starts out on the periphery of Taipei. He then drives along the motorway, passes a road toll booth, picks up his friend Gao, and then drives through a tunnel. He reaches a rural area and then gets out of the car, walks through the long grass in the field before finally reaching the sea shore. All of this just takes 13 minutes of screen time. There's definitely a narrative purpose. Ding An wants to tell his friend to tell him the truth about the ID card, but these scenes also capture a spatial trajectory from the city to the coast, a visual mapping in which diverse environments appear sequentially. The film's subsequent storylines also feature journeys. However, these are entirely subjective, abandoning any notion of geographic accuracy. The second storyline takes on the quality of a visual collage as characters travel along a drug-induced route that incorporates a scattered set of locations. They visit a hospital, a mountain hut, fields, a woodland tunnel before exiting in the middle of the city. Match cuts and action create a fluid, effective movement through environments that are in reality not adjacent. Whatever's being achieved in narrative terms, the effect here is a kind of cinematic tourism, the showcasing of Taiwan's diverse environments and landmarks such as Taipei 101, which at the time had only been open for two years. We see similar visualizations a few years later in Chen Yingrong's film Young Dudes, which focuses more on post-industrial landscapes. Trajectories of this type match routes between centre and periphery, a central to Jen's TV series, Days We Stared at the Sun. The first season was released in 2010 and initially intended as a standalone mini-series. Over five episodes, it tells the story of Hao Yuan, a teenage boy who was facing challenges on multiple fronts. Female authority figures are entirely absent from his life, while male authority figures, his father, teacher and a local politician, are all revealed as compromised or corrupt. Their activities, along with the social forces they represent, leave Hao Yuan feeling a sense of powerlessness and betrayal. That said, much of the series proceeds in the manner of a typical high school drama, following the personal relationships of a group of teenagers. Believing ourselves to be in this genre, we might doubt whether the likable Hao Yuan will triumph over his obstacles, but we never doubt that he'll always try to do the right thing and certainly never doubt for a moment that he'll survive. But in the final episode, these assumptions prove to be false. The suicide of his father tips Hao Yuan over the edge. He decides to enact a nihilistic revenge on the congressman who's become a focal point for his anger. But in the process of trying to assassinate the man, is Hao Yuan himself who is shot dead. It's not unheard of that it's pretty unusual for a TV season to kill off its protagonist in this manner and certainly not in this generic context. The bulk of the first series takes place in Taipei suburbs, shot in the areas around Deng Shui, and largely adheres to the tropes associated with portrayals of the hometown. This is typical of the high school genre, which in various national contexts relies on a sense of the local of distance from the specificity associated with urban centers and landmarks even if access to these is occasionally granted. It's perhaps something intrinsic to the genre's coming-of-age dynamics. Adult filmmakers already have temporal distance on the subject matter, but they seem to need spatial distance too, as if in memory, child had happened over there. Another reason the ending shocks is it because it shatters this illusion completely, signaling the intrusion of identifiable contemporary social realities. The second season, released seven years later, focuses on Hao Yuan's classmates, particularly the character of Cheng Yi. Given the time that has elapsed since series one, which is obviously unusual for TV to have that many years, no attempt is made to continue its specific storylines. Some characters are effectively abandoned, others are added, and there are big changes in setting and tone. So the action now takes place in central Taipei, and from the outset, the storyline and themes are explicitly political, indeed highly politicized. The season dramatizes the involvement of Cheng Yi in a university society called The Wave, a protest group that campaigns for political change. It directly depicts the sunflower movement, student movement, and protest of 2014 against the passing of the cross-straight trade agreement with China. It's a fairly rare fictional screen representation of these incidents, and certainly doesn't self-censor. In just the first episode, characters debate the relationship between China and Taiwan, the service support for Taiwanese independence, and discuss the national flag. The director explained why he approached the second season in this way. Our cast were young people who were around 17 years old when we made the first series. Five years later, they were at the age where they're graduating from university. During these years, society in Taiwan has changed, and young Taiwanese people, especially university students, have to a great extent participate in this change. It seems to create an opposition of generations. There's a generation of university students who are younger than me by about 10 years, and a generation of those who are 50-something, I happen to be in the middle. This generational conflict is now very strong, and you can see this, for instance, in the sunflower movement, or the movement against proposed school curriculum changes by the government. But if the character's ages make sense, then the question does remain why explore these issues using the exact same characters, and in this particular TV series? Presumably, Jen could have made a standalone series on the same subject. Market considerations are important. The first season gained quite a cult following, so it's logical to follow that up, but clearly in his own mind, the themes are deeply connected, despite apparent differences in subject and genre. I'd like to suggest that the mapping of national space and the retracing of mapped emotional roots is central to this. Days we stared at the sun explore sites of political awakening, tracing connections between places in the hometown, where the seeds of activism are sown as a result of localized personal experience, and then the center, where change is enacted on the national mediated scale. I think there's a self-reflexive component to this, as in 2017, the director reflects on the implicit radicalism of his earlier series, where he asks, does political change begin? In the first series, the characters rarely venture into central type pain. When they do, their excursions are associated with negative adult activity, there's a brothel overseen by some gangsters, and then a recording studio where Dinchu's music is rejected. Otherwise, the city is glimpsed in the background, generally out of the character's reach. They live on the periphery, though they're connected to the center by municipal architecture and networks. Even on a countryside walk, they find themselves at the foot of an enormous pylon. By contrast, the characters in season two circulate around environments in central type pain, in which social and political change can be enacted at a national level. So a university, a law firm, a law college, media outlets, and so on, as well as the public areas around the legislative and executive realm. Characters are constantly in and out of the exit of Shandell Temple MDR station, for example. Yet the city symbolic center is type A 101, occasionally glimpsed in season one, but far removed from the character's everyday reality. By contrast in season two, the character of Qin goes inside and up to the top. Type A is laid out before her in aerial overview. The haze adds to the impression of a flat background plane, while she is sharply in focus in the foreground. Idly outstretching her fingers, she points, as you would, when consulting a map. Like the aerial photograph of the coastline in Wauanose Del, Qin is offered an overview, but hers is certainly not an objective perspective, nor an unemotional one. Ironically, she's actually an exchange student from China, who maintains a pro-unification stance. Her opinions are shown to be rooted in informed judgment, but she's patronized by members of the wave who assume that she's been indoctrinated. So she speaks at this point in Type A 101 to her family on the phone, feeling sad and isolated, while she looks at the view below. When Qin finally leaves Taipei and also the series, she is shown crying, looking out of the window of a plane at the city below. So for a second time, the season's only Chinese character is granted an objective aerial overview, or apparently objective one. In the second half of season two, the storyline involving the real life protests comes to an end and a new plot gets underway, relating to a corporation dumping of illegal waste in a coastal community. By this point, the character of Shujong has emerged as a major protagonist and training to be a journalist, he heads from Taipei to the east coast to find out what's going on. As the second season returns from the center to the periphery, it formally begins to resemble the trajectory of the first season. There's an emphasis on entropy, as Shujong, increasingly disaffected and erratic and targeted by vested interests, finds himself drawn to violence. His experience comes to resemble that of Haoyuan, almost like a palimpsest, and indeed the audience is directly invited to make the connection. Season two opens with Shujong exclaiming, this is what I call a deliberate act as he protests against a corrupt industrialist. This directly echoes Haoyuan's words from the opening of season one. The end credits used for each episode of season two also allude to the character's shared trajectories. The credit sequence shows vehicles moving along a coastal road with police cars coming into view. For most of the season, we don't know what this footage is. We ultimately find out when we get to the final episode, it's the police who are on their way to confront Shujong, who's kidnapped, the corrupt industrialist, and he's gone into hiding. So the end credits of previous episodes anticipate the ending of the drama, offering a glimpse into the future. But there's something else going on here because strikingly, the footage is played in reverse, so the cars appear to be driving backwards. This seems to confirm that although they didn't know each other, the clue to Shujong's actions lies in the past, in how Haoyuan's lived experience backwards in the past. So the repeated credit sequence both anticipates and revisits at the same time. To conclude, in days we stared at the sun, Jen maps out the centre and periphery while alluding to shared and repeated emotional trajectories. He does this to reflect on where the rationale of a social change comes from, from what environment and in what form it is best enacted. While he evidently sympathises with Shujong's desire for a radical break, he ultimately sighs with Cheng Yi who favours incremental change from within existing social structures and institutions. The implication is that had these structures functioned in the first place, Haoyuan would never have taken the action that he did. And in realising this, Cheng Yi is ultimately able to save his friend from the same fate. Cheng Yi does this by using a map and it's one that again is interpreted emotionally. He asked Dingzhu to record Shujong's probable location from memory with the assistance of a map. So she does this and the route that she then indicates is the exact same route that we see depicted in the season's end credits each time. To wrap things up, it's worth noting the repetition, the retracing and revisiting of routes both spatial and emotional is a hallmark of Jin's work. In Duova, Xiaohui traces two routes along the lines of her hands suggesting the dual realities that exist within the story's universe. Yangyang is traumatically compelled to repeat an idea I've explored elsewhere with the film's second half retracing the major narrative beats of the first in the manner of a panic zest. In My Little Honeymoon, Chong'e has taken the same journey as countless other Vietnamese women seeking to live in Taiwan and within the film follows her friend's route to Taidong and then the husband then follows her. At the end of Waurun of Sidao, Nakhal decides to leave her tribal community to study in Taipei thereby revisiting the route taken many years earlier by her mother Panay who has since herself returned. So in the talk, I've tried to sketch out some ways in which General Che uses maps in his films and TV and also suggested how his work itself could be seen as a form of mapping. I think this is an approach that could have broader resonance in the context of post-New Wave Taiwan cinema. While there are certainly precursors, there nonetheless seems to have been a moment around 15 years ago when a lot of Taiwanese filmmakers often of diverse backgrounds and styles began to focus on charting the island as a distinctive environment. So I think mapping offers a lens through which to examine Taiwanese cinema over the past couple of decades and complements existing studies on authorship by suggesting a set, a shared set, of cultural and aesthetic concerns. Ho-ji-chan made a comment in one of the Q&As the other day that I found interesting. He said that the emergence of post-New Wave cinema wasn't solely about a set of individuals but also as he put it, the process of a particular time. Mapping is above all else. The process is a practice and as such opens up a range of questions and possibilities as we look at recent Taiwanese film. So that's it. I think that's where I'll leave it today. Thank you. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you. It's amazing. Thank you very much. Okay. I suppose before we open the floor and asking questions, I have to say I didn't expect this topic which is really close to my heart. May I ask the first question? I got a privilege as the chair. I have to say I'm really pleased with this opportunity to ask Chris about this. Chris, thank you because it's such a fascinating and quite an usual approach. And to think about not just Zheng Youjie's film but also talk about all the younger generation Taiwanese directors as a whole in many ways you are actually drawing quite a lot of examples from others as well. Thank you very much. You connect the changing sense of place and the duality of identity in this kind of cinematic sort of expression in many ways. It seems to me maybe I got it wrong because you have written such a succinct and so concise sort of argument. It seems that you see this to be like a general characteristic of the younger generation directors work not just only in Zheng Youjie's film because the particular emphasis you put on especially on cartography in your talk it seems to me you suggest his attention mainly is placed on national level. That's my reading of what you're saying. How about the sense of locality and localness in their films and how in your view a closer relationship between the Taiwanese and the cinematic expression of this kind of localness and locality can bring to a heightened identity. Can you elaborate a little bit about it? Yeah. Got it. It's tricky to lie. If we take his films as sort of an example I'm just thinking so for instance in my little honeymoon actually I mean I was referring to the last third of the film where she does travel and we see her going around different environments in the south but actually the bulk of the film is takes place pretty much within their home within the domestic sphere and in the local area that the town there may not which obviously is distinctive for a number of reasons but I think there's no reason I was focusing on sort of the bigger national questions I think today but there's no reason why that can't be can't be focused on the domestic sphere and we see a lot of films lately emphasizing the apartments, homes, houses as in theatrical terms something like Dear Ex does this as well like makes the contrast between the theatre space of the drama group and then the home where the characters live and also it can be you know critically you could approach this I mean Juliana Bruno does do this talking about kind of interior journeys within a room people who never actually leave the space but they emotionally, mentally travel and I think that's actually central to My Little Honeymoon so the characters so life confined imagining possibilities and anticipating possibilities and then is able to actually take the journey yeah so I think there's various ways in which he frames the desire to travel from within very small spaces and I think that's probably true of most directors so yeah perhaps I focus today more on the traveling and the experience of the island as a whole but yeah certainly this could be applied to the local I think okay I actually got more questions but I think I will leave it to Shao Yi to ask the question first and then come back thank you Shao Yi yeah our next few questions actually come from our friends and professors so maybe they could ask the questions so Martha would you like to if not I'll just read out oh sorry because I didn't have the sound oh sorry um yeah maybe you yeah um in fact I had just I have a question and I have a remark I really would like to thank you Christopher for for your beautiful presentation and in fact the all the maps also remind me how in films Taiwan was over can you switch on your video oh sorry yeah well thank you yes I don't know okay um it reminds me on of how Taiwan was always mapped in films you know from the Japanese era in in documentaries where you have always maps of Taiwan and the exploration and films mapping like trains film with trains mapping the the mastering of Taiwan by the colonial power and then you have that also in many in some the documentaries in in in at the time of the Guamindan when they arrive in Taiwan especially in a film called Meili Bao Dao so I think also in in in Jun Niu Jie for me he has a lot of irony and you can see this kind of irony in his work the way between official maps and the maps in his film and how he maps the territory in his film but my question sorry about it my question was um for me to as always hard to understand why and maybe it's the close to what Skorados is saying I really have a question because I think Jun Niu Jie is very special director and very different from the other directors of his generation especially because it seems never to compromise with the productions or you really addresses the political issues and I would like to know if you agree with that or if you don't know or I don't know it's really um yeah I think it's true that he's the of all of that whether we call them a generational group but he's the one that seems unafraid to explicitly direct address questions of of national identity the relationship with China even even as I said that the you know the depiction of the flag in itself is is quite a big deal because that immediately rules you out of particular markets and he does in virtually everything he's made except one I think um it's in quite obvious ways to um yeah and and yeah the sunflower sort of movement has not been depicted except really in documentaries but not really in fiction yeah so I totally agree that I think he feels um you know he feels that he's able to do that and that's something that he wants to do um whereas we don't we don't see that quite so explicitly addressed in other in other filmmakers work I was interested in what you're saying about the documentary I'd like to look at the the the colonial documentaries because I mean these aerial views are quite common in documentaries generally there's something that one reason I sort of began to think about this project was the what I think the absence of maps in older Taiwanese films that audiences would have seen until we get to the new cinema kind of period um yeah yeah in fact you have versus this kind of opposition in official cinema and the Taiyu film because you know taiyu stream are also a lot of being crossing the country from the countryside to the city to the south and everything and it's a kind of uh because official cinema which was much more focused on Taipei and well and yeah and the maps you see most of the films are like the maps of the entire china of course but yeah yeah it's quite interesting to see this kind of opposition but they're often kept out of the way sort of the husband's secret you do see a map in the police office but you know it sort of indicates authority we don't really see it we don't really get a sense of what it means with the details but to me the really funny one was Tarzan and the treasure because this is a film about a map it's a treasure map and we never see it and see them holding this bit of paper but we never actually look at it um probably censored um or or maybe it's actually the script I thought at one point the actor was holding the script but uh yeah they they seem absent until until the new taiwan cinema and and but that has implications for sort of how space is constructed as well because often they're quite um some of the Taiyupian like have disconnected spaces as well so I think that that reflects the absence of a central map sometimes thank you um thank you um I think yeah um Caradol Professor Mary also has a question so would you perhaps like to raise the question do you read it or I don't know um yeah I think we can hear you so maybe you can you can uh read your questions hi thank you very much for the talk um thank you very much I'd like to switch on your video I'm trying to okay thank you thank you for the for the great talk actually I have got two question but they are kind of um related very beginning of the talk you mentioned Lek if I remember right of Psyducki's homogeneity in and favorite videos for his generator and just yesterday we or in the past week we're trying to figure out why there might be a lack of western or festival recognition of this new generation of filmmakers sometimes we're wondering if you can elaborate a little idea about this lack of stylistic homogeneity if it's personal generational or has something to do with the digital era or the geopolitical situation and the second related always to the author theory I haven't seen the it's really a question it's a question of curiosity do you see between you know movie universe and tv as I mentioned between peaks is obviously lynching made and part of his thanks okay I didn't get that you might have to repeat the second one sorry I lost you a little bit sorry stylistic or enough continuity in yeah and film I just downloaded the tv show and so I've seen few images and this struck me as very tv or you know digital image and not as a picture as these movies but then I haven't seen the episode or yeah you see a continuity like you get one episode of the estering of the sun as you get one episode of twin peaks and you say oh this looks like David link and I was wondering if you see something like this okay diverse yeah thanks um so the first yeah the first question I mean this is sort of why I began to think about the the question of mapping or another approach in the first place because it did seem to me that these most of these directors who have emerged in the last 15 20 years um that they don't necessarily have stylistic consistency in their work and I I do think that this is is probably a factor in why some of their films haven't been recognised uh internationally um particularly as you know the model of the the time we need to deter has been this kind of it's often been it's it's there's the particular how style um associated with that the sort of the wide the the wide shots that the long takes the use of silence and so on um it's often associated with a particular kind of modernism or post-modernism that does it even at the time I think excluded other voices so someone to me who always seems a precursor for sort of filmmakers now is Sylvia Chump who never really fit into this model either because for various reasons you know partly she's she's a woman and also the use of melodrama um in her sort of her embrace of that the sense that because she was working in in other places that she wasn't sort of making necessarily Taiwanese um films films about Taiwanese national identity but I think she's an interesting person to look at in terms of how uh how we might approach Ota today because I think she's sort of has some of the same characteristics they do in a sense that she's not necessarily wedded to any particular style um sorry there's a police car just not for me at home um but if you're looking for sort of Ota's in that sort of the new Taiwan sort of model I guess like for people who've emerged in the last couple of decades I mean it seems to me there's sort of only really two you've got Midi Zed and then you've got Chongmung Hong um who you know in in stylistic terms are sort of readily identifiable that you can watch their work and you know it's them um whereas most of the others that I wouldn't say fit into that category so it's partly I think we need to rethink what do we expect from a director um you know do do we even need to make a case for them as Ota's necessarily and it does I think show how wedded we are to this question of style so in a way I thought well it performance for me is one way of looking at Chongmung Hong's work in terms of a consistent focus and then mapping is potentially something that's shared by a range of different directors by that they could articulate it differently such as we get this performative element of emphasis from from Chengyu Jie so yeah the reason why I'm sort of thinking about my who is partly to get out of this difficulty of the fact that there is no stylistic consistency in many directors work um I don't think which is not a criticism at all you know I love these films um but it's just that's not what they're doing and yeah the relationship with with TV um I wouldn't say that I would watch his episodes of his show and sort of know it's him um in that sense but what I would say is that if you look at his body of work um you know he's made tv films tv tv movies and my little honeymoon was made was made for television and um in the format for instance so you see a sort of it split in half obviously where there would be the commercial break or where that would have played the next day but actually what I like is that he uses that um for his own purposes because again it's sort of most of his films and tv shows are split in half and they sort of sort of look at this idea of duality in some way so he actually makes use of that the two sort of environmentalist perspectives of each half for instance um same with the recent tv series uh they just said at some two the first half about politics the second half is about something completely different so I think he does exploit the form to fit with his own preoccupations um but clearly you could link that I guess to sort of tv theory more generally um in terms of um the sort of the repetition of flow of overlaying narratives again and again um yeah thank you great shall you um yeah um but I think see you did you mentioned that you you have some questions yes I actually have one more if I may is that okay um I was wondering because you you you did clarify um at the beginning that um he is a director as well as a quite well known actor and and quite you know highly achieved well respected well how do you think this dual identity affect his filmmaking I know you you you mentioned about performance is very important now I just thinking why if that's the case he's a professional uh performer why does he like to use non-professional performance so much hmm I mean I I think I mean he doesn't use he uses non-professionals sometimes so why wouldn't see that is like an obvious example of of the use but then there's a particular reason for that and that's there's actually that's maybe part of a general trend in films about indigenous communities that they like lahum about her films also all use non-professionals and there's a partly is about um showing something more authentic um and being respectful of particular communities to sort of allow them to represent themselves to some degree um so that I think with that film there's that um there's a range of things going on um doesn't use non-professionals so much in any of his other work um yeah I mean how he divided the at the directing on wow and oh Siddharth was quite interesting because he actually took the professional actor so it was Ado and then got his name but the guy who plays the estate agent yeah and he directed those two while um legals shumi did the did the others basically so the the kids the grand part and then all the non-professionals so um there was a conscious choice made in that film to sort of divide those duties by how professional they were um and I think that again was because they you know legals he knew the community he uh he was he was he knew how to work with them and what they expected yeah because it's so powerful for for example the elderly's uh you know uh their performance is really not just natural but it's really sincere so it's actually make the professional look not as good as them well that's for the audience to say of course um okay if we we ask about this duality of identity I actually want to ask you because you are a film maker well as a film scholar um yesterday during the round table uh we have it's my personal observation I found that um uh the discussion actually go down this kind of two parallel line uh film study scholars have a little bit different approach well I know they are all here so I can't um maybe they don't agree with me but I feel as a filmmaker and as a film scholar maybe you have a different take uh when you're analyzing films for example films yeah I mean I I think it is probably inevitable I mean I always try to like step step aside from that at some level but no I think it's inevitable that mainly in some of the um because I think you do just become so much more aware of the sheer practicalities um of a production um but then sometimes this can I think shed new light on why people do things so for instance um one thing I'm always conscious of is even Lin-Wai-Wai-No-Si-Dao for instance some of those some of those scenes although they don't seem that they would be that difficult to shoot they're actually really difficult to shoot uh for example on the beach with the rocks it looks like it's just next to the village I think geographically it's it is pretty close to the village but the point is if you're walking there and setting up a camera and they use the red epic so there's a reasonable amount of kit there um these you know and I know from the location as well this is this is very difficult just to walk down there and set up these massive rocks you know you're you're talking about crew the actors where the toilet's going to be yeah so there's a whole kind of set of practical questions that come into play you sort of realize the the achievement of being able to do that and also some of the difficulties so he did mention um sort of um with the non-professionals that at times they did you know they were giving kind of effective performances they were sort of acting for the camera and so actually he would have to leave leave the camera running for a while and sort of while they thought it was a rehearsal um so it's sort of in terms of techniques again you become maybe a bit more focused on how things happened in practice um but yeah I mean I've been thinking about this a lot lately in relation to forests so oh yeah I've noticed that and again if you want something that defines a lot of recent films in terms of the environments like we've got a lot of films about forests suddenly appeared in the last decade you know mountain forests and they haven't really featured in Taiwanese films since the 70s um you know in sort of the martial arts genre and yet we've got Starry Starry Night there was Fora Debussy we've got the tag along series and a range of other films and suddenly forests trees mountains are kind of there a lot so and and this is sort of interesting for a number of ways but thinking from as a filmmaker um I think the reason why that can happen is partly down to the ability to digital technology because simply you wouldn't be able to take a crew up to those places in previous decades whereas now it is possible even though it's very difficult so in Fora Debussy the the crew pretty much had to hike for three or four hours again with all the kits on the bags in order to get this sort of beautiful cinematography of the forest landscapes but again this wasn't easy and I guess as a filmmaker I'd be potentially just a bit more attuned to that like because I'm sort of showing in isolated landscapes myself it's very difficult but then that's one reason I think why we've seen these films appear a bit more is because the technology allows so how about drone are they using drone or you you certainly I mean that we certainly see a few drone shots in um in some recent films I mean obviously you've got um others of the English translation was a ground it's the sort of it's the hexagram adaptation he uses drone shots at the end there he goes over Ludao to film the prison and sort of zooms uh zooms in and goes through into the prison um so you're seeing some drone shots the thing is that I mean that they're quite tricky because they are often visibly different to the camera that the film is shot on so you can tell the difference when because we can't obviously get a heavy camera on the drone um I haven't seen too many drone shots there was obviously the the famous aerial aerial film that Hoja used but that was not that that wasn't a drone no and oh someone said godspeed godspeed were there drones in that I'm just trying to think no drop down no sorry because there's a lot of I see the chats I don't know it's on the in the film that's why I was wondering is there are some drones thing um I would say that they're probably I mean I don't know but I would I wouldn't say the drones I think they're helicopter shots in in godspeed yeah yeah you know yesterday Robert Chen Professor Chen was talking about um he's analysis on this this period of new directors and and he was saying actually he saw this kind of uh non-Taipei uh landscape become the the the main and echoing what you are saying actually yeah yeah I think there's um there's been an effort there's a lot of this sort of the the new the new Taiwan cinema is focused on Taipei or Galshung but whereas lately there's been a lot of films moving to say the suburbs of cities as well as other rural areas and landscapes such as the small islands land you and so on more films shot there but yeah I'd be quite interested in films like um Shenzhen by uh Bon Han and he's another director I really like and he sort of shot that in the suburbs of Taijong mainly in a house in the surrounding areas around a house but yeah this is not the kind of landscape that we would generally have tended to see in in earlier cinema I don't think sort of as in in the in the 70s 80s yeah okay I think it's the sheer diversity of the landscapes there's a sense that you know every inch of this can be can now be covered um in finding so you and um Laha Mabao obviously takes the small camcorder and goes for a two day hike I think it took to get up to that in the mountains where the ancestral village was and um you know there's a sense that she's able to do that with the technology but again probably wouldn't have been possible even 10 years before that hmm and Shaoyi is there any more questions yeah I think that um I think most of them are comments on um yeah I think Ting Ying is affirming that Zhong's are used in God's feet okay I'm I'm preparing to accept sorry yeah I don't know yeah and clear sorry can you repeat again um yeah I think Ting Ying just said that um she thinks um drones are used in God's feet okay okay yeah thank you very much Ting Ying um I think wow it's amazing session that actually um I I couldn't imagine at the beginning that um this is uh this is about um you know this kind of almost like cartographic mapping of Zheng Zheng's film and many more um I have to say the time I think on that note maybe we can wrap up a discussion if there's no more questions okay thank you very much and I would like to thank our speaker Chris is a fantastic to welcome you to show us this is the first time you join us um I can see uh the future uh appearance in our event as well and I hope that you will like to come back to share your new book you'll be delighted thank you fantastic okay okay thank you very much now I would like to say a big thank you to to professor no sorry Dr Brown sorry yeah yeah well it will be soon and also our audience and or a fantastic um contribution from the um our audience and thank you very much and uh don't forget we still have uh Friday's Q&A session so may I ask you to put your hands together if you can and and give um Chris a round of applause or you can just say thank you