Director Cheng Wen-tang--Finding Utopia Through Film

In recent years Cheng has had a full plate of work. Whether directing dramatic series for public television or the film Blue Cha Cha, this old film hand, who is nearly 50, has been as busy as a bee. Though already booked solid with directing commitments, the delicately built Cheng has still found time to open a coffee shop at "The Wall" in the Kungkuan area of Taipei. Ah-tang wants to give film people a place to gather and chat. Young at heart, he also wants to understand what creative youth are up to these days.

Born in Ilan in 1958, Cheng majored in drama at Chinese Culture University. It was an education that prepared him to work in the film industry. After graduating, he got a job at a production company, where he worked on a few Taiwanese social realist films. Then in 1982 he began to work for Ogilvy & Mather, the advertising agency. At the time, the Taiwanese economy was booming, and prospects in advertising were bright.

The Passage, a dramatic feature film that Cheng made in 2004.

Against the grain of the 1980s

Cheng recalls that when he was working in advertising, making money was easy. Those in the field regarded themselves as society's new nobility. "They'd always be comparing whose clothes were more expensive or whose fountain pen was better!" But in 1984 there were three serious mining accidents in Taipei County. "In particular, the cave-in at the Haishan Mine killed many Taiwanese Aborigines, but few people cared, and no television stations sent reporters to cover the story." Full of righteous indignation, Cheng used his contacts in advertising to borrow a camera, with which he recorded images at the scene of the tragedy. From shooting the first corpse being taken out of the mine to seeing how many of the survivors ended up in a permanent vegetative state due to inhaling carbon monoxide, the whole experience moved Cheng deeply. Slowly, he began to understand what he wanted to do with his life.

That year foreign films began to be screened in connection with the Golden Horse Awards. Like many of the era's young intellectuals, Cheng noticed how third-world leftist films gave a voice to the oppressed. These raised his social consciousness, strengthening his concern for the weak and his desire to right social injustices. In that era just before the repeal of martial law, society was wracked by numerous problems. Meanwhile, advertising people lived affluent lives among their own circles. Upon his return to Ogilvy & Mather, Cheng found that he "just couldn't go on" working the way he had. He resigned his position and began to work outside the system making films and videos for various social movements.

Cheng was a member of the "Green Team," Taiwan's most important outsider documentary group in the 1980s. Whether about labor, the environment, indigenous peoples, or politics, they worked on documentaries for just about every progressive social movement and disadvantaged group.

Those were romantic times, but with earnings of only about NT$10,000 a month, it was hard to see much of a future in the work. You had to allow your idealism to trump all. With the repeal of martial law and the need to support a family and children, Ah-tang, thought, "I can't let them suffer the way I have." He decided to put those days of scraping to make ends meet behind him, and in 1994 he temporarily returned to work in advertising. The following year he formed Green Light Film with the director Ke Yi-cheng. After "drifting around for a bit," Cheng had returned to the world of films.

The Passage, a dramatic feature film that Cheng made in 2004.

Accidental director

By the time Ah-tang had returned to film, the golden years of the industry in Taiwan had already passed. Opportunities were few and far between. First he worked as a producer and wrote a script, Connection by Fate, which was turned into a film by Wan Jen.

In 1998, the newly established Public Television System sought scripts for its Life Story drama series. PTS placed no restrictions on the subject matter, other than stipulating that it relate to "a river's flow." It turned out that back in the 1980s Cheng had written a story based on his childhood home by the Lanyang River. Unsatisfied with the script, he had just stuffed it into a drawer. But with the deadline for PTS looming, he pulled out his old screenplay. Public Television liked what they saw, and Cheng argued that rather than turning it over to someone else to direct, he would do the best job of capturing its true feeling. Lanyang River Youth was the first work he directed.

Cheng didn't betray any of the nervous jitters of a rookie. "I'd worked many times as a script supervisor and producer, and I'd shot commercials and documentaries. The basic skills were there." To meet PTS' planning requirements, he started off with Lanyang River Youth, and then wrote a total of 11 other scripts about rivers in northern, central and southern Taiwan. Because Lanyang River Youth did well, PTS also agreed to let him shoot the TV movies Chuoshui River Agreement and Vanity Tamshui. These three works comprise Ah-tang's "river trilogy."

Cheng is enraptured with images of the mountains, rivers and sea. In his river trilogy, rivers represent idealism and a sense of belonging, as well as the inner feelings hidden behind people's outer appearances. Chuoshui River Agreement garnered four Golden Bell nominations for excellence in television, including best director. With Leon Dai winning the award for best actor, the film brought a lot of glory to PTS.

Having earned the trust of PTS, Cheng proposed his next plan: a "tribal trilogy" that would discuss in depth the situation of indigenous peoples in Taiwan. His interest in them sprang from his earlier social movement work. Back then he had frequently made merry with Aborigines, hitting the bottle and talking until the wee hours. "I'd often heard the singer Kimbo Hu tell stories about Aboriginal life. I'd never let go of them. They were all filed away in my mind."

PTS gave him NT$4.5 million to shoot Maya's Rainbow, The Youth Nabus, and Watan's Bottle. That was a lot of money for public television. But Cheng was intent on doing the best job possible. After starting to shoot the trilogy on videotape, he decided that he wanted the feel of film and put up his own money to shoot Watan's Bottle in 35 millimeter. Apart from becoming a TV movie, this NT$3.5 million work also served as the basis for Somewhere over the Dreamland.

With Guey Lun-mei as the female lead, The Passage succeeded in giving the National Palace Museum a "younger" image.

The oldest hot young director

Cheng's path to becoming a director for film and television was an unusual one. He was 44 at the time. Compare that to the young directors of today, who are about 30. Some call him the oldest hot young film director.

But like fine wine, some things and people only improve with age. Somewhere over the Dreamland revolves around three separate stories: Watan, a heartbroken Atayal who goes to the city to find his old lover, hoping that they can return together to their village and work the land; Little Mo, a lost youth who spends his evenings looking for companions on a telephone matchmaking service and longs to one day fulfill his dream of going to Tokyo; and a girl who works in a children's amusement park, who is always looking for someone to tell a love story about millet fields. These three people, who have experienced three different kinds of loss, are bound by fate to connect with each other eventually. And yet in the film these connections are not clearly stated. The film provides food for thought.

This "accidental creation" not only garnered good notices, it also came out of nowhere to win the Venice Critics Week at the Venice Film Festival, as well as the award for best Taiwanese film at the Golden Horse Awards. It gave Cheng a lot of exposure within the film community.

The birth of Cheng Wen-tang's second film was also a twisted process. In celebration of its 80th anniversary, the National Palace Museum (founded in 1925) hired him to shoot a 30-minute promotional film based on his abundant experience. Apart from the requirement that the film be a drama using the NPM as a background, there weren't many restrictions placed on content.

Describing a long and sensitive friendship between women, Blue Cha Cha has just ended its run in the theaters. Crowded out by Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, it grossed only NT$450,000 throughout Taiwan.

A National Palace Museum production...

"Perhaps because the museum wasn't familiar with the film industry, it budgeted the hefty amount of NT$8 million for each short film. Cheng jokes that had he been more mercenary he might have made the films according to their specifications "and earned a house in the process." But always the straight arrow, Cheng didn't just take the money and run.

To shoot an NT$8 million short film only to show it in a museum conference room would not only be a waste of money, it would also be limited in its effectiveness. So Cheng suggested that the museum take the original promotional short and turn it into a full-length film, which could be released commercially in theaters, providing much greater bang for the buck. Cheng also invested NT$1 million himself, hoping that what he had originally seen as merely a job to do a promotional film would turn into a work of his own that he could throw himself into.

The film, which is called The Passage, stars Guey Lun-mei, who has been popular with young people since her performance in Blue Gate Crossing. In it she plays a young researcher in the staid old National Palace Museum. Like Somewhere over the Dreamland, the film is woven from three separate narrative strands: the Guey Lun-mei character and a Japanese tourist (Kajeyama Yukihiko) meet because of the calligraphy Cold Food Observance; Guey Lun-mei also has an abortive love affair with a freelance writer (Leon Dai); and artifacts from NPM are followed from mainland China to Taiwan.

Although the museum funded The Passage, Tang successfully avoided the typical stale tone found in cultural promotion films. He put the emphasis on the museum, Cold Food Observance, the drifting lives of the drama's characters, and their experience of not having their talents recognized. It might seem that The Passage is about the artifacts it describes--those cold pieces of hardware. But it would be better to say that the film describes a condition of not knowing where to turn and of continually searching for new paths. Cold and hard historical artifacts are brought to life through their interaction with the characters in the stories.

The film--a "National Palace Museum production"--earned more than NT$1.1 million in box office receipts in Taiwan, and it was entered in the Tokyo Film Festival. Not only did it accomplish the goal of helping the museum seem "younger," it also showed that Cheng, despite the very poor market for domestic films, can make the most of whatever he is given, all the while holding true to his unique narrative style.

From making documentaries outside the system with the Green Team to becoming a prolific director of dramatic films, Cheng Wen-tang, a man of many expressions, has used the camera to capture the many sides of life.

Actors up front

Cheng Wen-tang's 2006 film Blue Cha Cha is set in Kaohsiung's Chichin. Tracy Su plays the lead. An abused wife who is suffering from depression, she kills her husband. The story begins after she is released from jail. She faces continual frustrations in relations with the opposite sex. While in jail, she had met a bar owner played by Lu Yi-ching, and the two had looked out for each other. Now on the outside, this bar owner is the only one willing to help her.

Cheng says that previously, when he was involved in the labor movement, he would often go south to Kaohsiung. He always especially liked Chichin Harbor, with its feeling of freedom, rootless drifting, and rough-and-tumble debauchery. The area's numerous factories are important scenery in Blue Cha Cha.

Perhaps because of his background in documentaries, Ah-tang demanded that the actors wear hard hats, facemasks and the whole uniform of factory workers when he shot in the factory. While he shot these scenes, the factory didn't shut down; it merely opened up a new production line for the film. "Workers are workers; there's no point or purpose served in prettifying them!" Using the vocabulary of his earlier social movement days, he stresses "staying real."

At the end of the film, a hand puppet theater troupe surrealistically appears in Chichin. A mysterious youth with nimble hands takes pale-faced and stiff-limbed puppets and brings them to life, having them dance agilely at the seaside. The two lead women, melancholic and frustrated, here seem to have received redemption and comfort. Before the vast, deep-blue sea, they forget their cares as they dance a cha-cha. Before the ending, Cheng arranged for a fisherman to say: "The sea is vast and cures all ills." With this bit of folk wisdom, they seem to achieve a temporary state of peace and reconciliation amid the world's troubles and suffering.

Badu's Homework, a short film for children that Cheng made in 2003.

Idealism's utopia

For Cheng, there is nothing strange about the life of the puppeteer that appears in Blue Cha Cha. In fact, his father was a traveling salesman of medicines, and the joys and sorrows of people in the lower social strata are what he saw every day during his childhood in Ilan's Luotung.

Perhaps this kind of background always gives the lead characters in Cheng Wen-tang's works a quality of wandering and debauchery, but it doesn't make them any less moving or empathetic. "Power is always most important." The authors he admires most, such as Chen Ying-chen and Huang Chun-ming, as well as the British left-wing director Ken Loach, are all practitioners of realism; they speak for the common people, and strive for a "better world."

Whether speaking of Ah-tang's documentaries of the 1980s, which strove for fairness and social justice; or the idealism of his "river trilogy"; or the native flavor and redemption of his "tribal trilogy"; or the striving of the characters in The Passage and Blue Cha Cha to overcome life's obstacles, the people in Cheng's works are always striving to fulfill some kind of dream. When asked what common theme runs through his work, Ah-tang says, "It's probably the search for utopia!"

The utopia in Cheng's mind doesn't necessarily involve revolution and overthrow of the social system; it could also be an individual's pure wish for making life better-- for instance, finding a place where one can have a life and settle down or a state of mind free from worries and distractions. But as far as many busy modern people are concerned, isn't this a distant and unobtainable dream?

In his Che Cafe, which he named after the Argentinian-Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, there is a pause in the interview. The stereo happens to be playing John Lennon's "Imagine": "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope some day you'll join us, and the world will live as one."

As Lennon's words end, Ah-tang cocks his head aslant and calmly says, "I simply feel that people have got to hold onto a little idealism and maintain at the same time a practical working attitude; I suppose that's the spirit of the 1980s." From working in social movements to becoming a film director, from documentaries to full-length dramatic films, in the course of these 20 years Cheng perhaps hasn't changed at all. Even if his methods are different and he has developed a special style, he is still that idealist using images in his quest for utopia.

From making documentaries outside the system with the Green Team to becoming a prolific director of dramatic films, Cheng Wen-tang, a man of many expressions, has used the camera to capture the many sides of life.

Chronology of Cheng Wen-tang's works
1987 In the Days with No Government (Green Team documentary)
1987 Writing History with a Steering Wheel (Green Team documentary)
1989 The Soul of Taiwan (Green Team documentary)
1998 Lanyang River Youth (PTS TV movie)
1999 Chuoshui River Agreement (PTS TV movie)
1999 Postcard (16 mm dramatic short film)
2000 Vanity Tamshui (PTS TV movie)
2000 Hsilien (PTS TV movie)
2001 Maya's Rainbow (PTS TV movie)
2001 The Youth Nabus (PTS TV movie)
2002 Watan's Bottle (PTS TV movie)
2002 Somewhere over the Dreamland (35 mm full-length dramatic film)
2003 Badu's Homework
2003 Sequel to Cold Night: Lonely Village--Single Lantern (PTS dramatic series)
2004 The Passage (35 mm full-length dramatic film)
2005 The Wounds of February 28th (PTS TV movie)
2006 Blue Cha Cha (35 mm full-length dramatic film)

From making documentaries outside the system with the Green Team to becoming a prolific director of dramatic films, Cheng Wen-tang, a man of many expressions, has used the camera to capture the many sides of life.

Cheng's 1999 short film Postcard.

Cheng, who has the aura of a wanderer, believes that film and video's power derive from their ability to depict things true to life.