Heidelberg University: Details of event: Film screening: Untold herstory (2022) directed by Zero Chou, 112min

Wednesday
17
JUL

06:00 PM

Film screening: Untold herstory (2022) directed by Zero Chou, 112min

SYNOPSIS
Yu Hsing-hui, a high school student who goes by the name Kyoko, is inexplicably sentenced as a thought criminal and sent to Green Island Prison for re-education. Once on the island, she is forced to endure bullying from officers and is snitched on by other prisoners, and we also learn, through nightmarish flashbacks, of her torture and suffering after her arrest and before her arrival on the island. Once there, however, she finds friendlier companions who help her in the struggle for survival, like Chen Ping, a talented dancer who is in a complex relationship with the prison’s Captain Fang, and Yen Shui-Hsia, a communist activist who was a nurse before her imprisonment. Soon after her arrival, the Department launches a movement that spurs a rebellion among the prisoners. The prisoners think their resistance has succeeded, but they are unaware that others are headed to their deaths. Set in 1953, this movie is based on a true story, and on actual historical events, as retold in the 2012 book Liuma gou 15 by Chang Chang-Mei who was just 19 years old when she was arrested and deported to Green Island.As she recalls in the 2012 book, “I didn’t join the [KMT], nor did I join the communist party. I just wanted to get an education. I didn’t care about those things.” While the book and the movie differ in quite a few parts, the movie captures the lives of Taiwanese people during the White Terror, a period usually considered to have begun in 1949 –when martial law was established in Taiwan. For some the White Terror ended in 1987 when martial law was lifted, while others mark its ending in 1992, with the repeal of Article 100 of the Criminal Code that permitted the prosecution of "anti-state" activities. In order to deepen her understanding of the lives and challenges that women like the six former prisoners interviewed by Chang Chang-Mei for her book, Zero Chou also searched for former Green Island female prisoners who were still alive and whose stories had never been told before. She mentions in the interview also listed below that this was a really difficult quest, as many women were not willing to discuss what had happened to them during the White Terror in general, and as thought prisoners in particular. But thanks to Chou’s extensive labor, while the names of the film’s protagonists are mainly fictional, its events are quite realistic and drawn from the lives of real people. One point that was in this regard important for Chou was to depict accurately the multilingual dimension of the daily lives of the people on the island. At the time, the only language allowed in Taiwan was Mandarin. However, for some of the prisoners, like nurses, intellectuals, and students, Japanese, which had been the language of their educational journey during the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945), were more comfortable speaking in Japanese. Others had come from mainland China or were farmers or fishermen, and were thus more comfortable speaking their respective dialects, from Cantonese to Shandongese and Hakka. Thus, Chou asked the actors to learn, if needed, and to practice the languages spoken by their respective characters for at least three months before shooting started, so that their performance in the various languages could come across as authentic.

Zero Chou, one of the few openly lesbian film makers in the world, and even fewer ones in Taiwan, is a very prolific director and screen writerhas often depicted in her work the lives and the struggles of LGBTQ persons, as we see in Spider Lilies 2007, Drifting Flowers, 2008, Ripples of desire 2012, The Substitute, 2017, and We are Gamily, 2017. Some of these movies are part of her six-film series called the Six Asian Cities Rainbow Project. It is thus remarkable that she has found the time to make this powerful movie about female ‘thought prisoners’ who couldn’t stop thinking.

Address

Institut für Sinologie

010.01.05

Voßstraße 2

69115 Heidelberg

Homepage Event

https://www.zo.uni-heidelberg.de/sinologie/research/tls

Organizer

Institut für Sinologie

Homepage Organizer

www.zo.uni-heidelberg.de/sinologie

Contact

Institut für Sinologie

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