Songs of Pastaay
矮人祭之歌
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.
Directors
Hu Tai-Li
Hu Tai-li was a renowned documentary filmmaker, film festival programmer, and anthropologist in Taiwan. She was a research fellow and director at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, as well as a concurrent professor at the Institute of Anthropology, National Tsing Hua University. She was also the president of Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival. She has directed and produced nine documentary films (The Return of Gods and Ancestors, Songs of Pasta’ay, Voices of Orchid Island, Passing Through My Mother-in-law’s Village, Sounds of Love and Sorrow, Encountering Jean Rouch, Stone Dream, After Passing, and Returning Souls).
Lee Daw-ming
Lee Daw-Ming is a filmmaker and a film scholar. He graduated from the Master of Fine Arts Program in Film, Television and Radio at Temple University. He is an Associate Professor at Graduate Institute of Cinematic Art, Taipei National University of the Arts.