Talk: New Auteurs in Taiwan Post-New Wave Cinema: Hou Chi-Jan, Lin Shu-Yu, and Cheng Yu-Chieh
Examining those under-examined ‘new auteurs’ in the post-New Wave Taiwan Cinema
5 November, 2020 2:00 pm
If you had the opportunity to reverse the course of your life, how would you like your story to end?
A lowly assistant who works on a film set, Pang is trying to level his low self-esteem in order to muster enough courage to talk to the actress he is falling head over heels for. Just when he thinks his luck is about to change, things take a dramatic turn…
Ding-An, an illegal immigrant, has been waiting for eight years to get his citizenship so that he can finally go home to visit his sick father. He then realizes that his ID Card has long ago been issued but has been kept away from him. Determined to claim his identification, Ding-An is willing to do anything, even if it means costing his life.
A small time crook and drug addict, Rat wakes up to find himself in a deserted hospital ward with no recollection of the previous night’s events. His shirt is stained in blood, but a wound is missing, and so is one of the girls he partied with the night before. As he steps outside to retrace his footsteps, he finds himself in the middle of nowhere, not quite sure where he is, or whether he is still alive….
Boss hasn’t slept in three days and is starting to believe that everyone around him is plotting to take his life. After being threatened at gunpoint, he decides to visit his brother, the last person he feels he can trust, only to be confronted with further disaster.
Lixiang is directing his first feature film, but he can’t decide how he’d like his movie to end, and at the same time, he is struggling to make peace with a past that continues to haunt him.
Written and directed by Cheng Yu-chieh, Do Over follows five characters over twenty-four hours on the last day of the year. As the interrelated stories proceed, the connections between the lives of the five characters begin to reveal themselves and their stories unravel. By weaving together multiple stories of different characters at emotional crossroads, Do Over examines the struggle of overcoming our greatest fears; the unknown of what lies ahead in the future, the fading value of our existence in the present, and most of all, irreversible mistakes made in the past that may catch up to us.
