Taiwan

The Pasta’ay, which means the festival of the legendary little people, is a significant ritual held every other year in the Saisiat aborigine group in Taiwan.
Every ten years, they hold the Great Ritual. This film focuses on the Great Ritual in 1986. It tries to convey the Saisiat people’s affection for and belief in the legendary little people. At the same time, the film brings into light Saisiat people’s ambivalence towards tourist invasion, and their dilemma of being caught between tradition and modernization. Structured by the Pasta’ay songs’ movements, the film breaks down to 15 chapters. It carefully juxtaposes the visual with the aural elements, which are conveyed in the conceptual dichotomy between “the real” and “the artificial”.
This film is with the intention to present the content of Pasta’ay (the festival of the legendary little people) of the Saisiat aborigine group in Taiwan by imitating the unusual structure of Pasta’ay songs. The repetitive song pattern seems to reflect the Saisait people’s ambivalent feelings of reverence and fear, welcome and rejection, towards the outsite world, represented by the legendary little people, ta’ay.

From late November to early December in 1936, Utsurikawa Nenozo, professor of Institute of Ethnology, Imperial Taihoku University, guided his assistant Myamoto Nobuto to the Ta-ai ceremony ground in Hsinchu’s Five Finger Mountain area to investigate the Saisiyat ceremony, Pas-taai. With cameras, they documented the lively large-scale sacred events which lasted for days. Through the precious images, the people and the scenes of the ceremony of seventy years ago reappear before our eyes, including various clans beating glutinous rice cakes, the making of the dance hat Kirakil, ceremonial singing and dancing to entertain the spirits, and processes such as chasing the spirits, sending off the spirits, food worship, chopping hazels, destroying racks, etc.

Ye Cai was born in 1946. When still quite young, he signed with Eastman Kodak Company as a professional photographer. For seven years, Ye traveled around the world to capture the beauty of all cultures. However, when he saw that people in Europe were very conscious of their own cultures and histories, he gave up on this prestigious job and returned to Taiwan, to the Hakka communities of Hsinchu county. There, he has devoted himself to capturing the essential moments of Hakka life and the beauty of the Hakka culture. Ye has photographed the authentic life of laborers and continues to create photos that chronicle the Hakka culture of Hsinchu County. His photographic masterpieces are a priceless asset to the Hakka people of Hsinchu and to all of Taiwan. This film documents the life and photographs of the artist. It explores the breadth and depth of Hakka culture in the narrations of Ye Cai himself, as well as Hsinchu villagers and local Hakka culture workers.

In my father’s memory, our family had the experience of building a 10- person boat 30 years ago. Father is now the only elder in the family fishing team. Thus, in order to leave the family fishing team a memory of boat building, Father decided to make a new boat after discussing with other members. This film records the stories of the hard experiences of the siradokoran fishing team members from the female point of view, of how they reclaimed land, made up Calla Lily fields, and found timbers for building up the boat.

This film is more than an introduction to the boat-making process and the grand launching ceremony. More importantly, through the boat-making culture, the film shows the important roles that the Tao women played during the process of boat building.

This film documents the boat-building and rowing process from Tao Island to Taiwan, sponsored by the “2007 Dream Project: Rowing 2007 Ocean Etude.” It shows the essence of Tao oceanic culture. The director worked with his good Tao friend, Shyaman Vengaayen, as the curators of an exhibition project about the traditional Tao boat-building culture at the National Museum of Natural Science in Taichung. They asked Shyaman Vengaayen’s father how to tread those taboos and scared ceremonies in Taiwan. “Why are you so worried? There’s no our spirits in Taiwan,” Father said so. The Tao people are facing the double bind of traditional cultural discipline and modernization’s impacts. This film shows how they look at, reflect on, adjust to, and cope with the experience of reconciling tradition and modernity through the process of boating-building and sailing.