Ethnic ChinaLit

One of just 9 films to be shortlisted for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards in Hollywood, Seediq Bale (《賽德克·巴萊》) is a 4.5-hour epic about one Taiwanese aboriginal tribe’s war of resistance against the Japanese in the 1930s, shot entirely in the Seediq language.

As is often the case with contemporary Chinese literature, a French publisher has published the novel itself before any Anglophone publisher has got around to it. Entitled Les Survivants, it is co-translated from the Chinese into French by Esther Lin and Emmanuelle Péchenard.

On his French blog, Bernard Mialaret reports (Drame de la colonisation):

Après la défaite chinoise, le traité de Shimonoseki en 1895, cède l’île au Japon jusqu’en 1945. Une politique d’assimilation est engagée, la langue japonaise est imposée, les tatouages traditionnels et les ablations dentaires sont interdits. En 1926, les Atayals rendent 1300 fusils, « l’arme étant le bien le plus précieux du chasseur » (p.90) mais les crânes, « objets sacrificiels » sont conservés.

En octobre 1930, un incident entre le fils de Mona Rudao, chef d’une tribu Sedeq et un policier japonais, conduisit à l’élimination par « fauchage » des têtes de 130 Japonais qui assistaient à une manifestation sportive à Musha. La réplique massive des Japonais avec des armes modernes, entraîna des suicides en masse de Sedeq. En avril 1931, les aborigènes d’une autre tribu Sedeq, les Tuuda, à l’instigation des Japonais, « fauchèrent » une centaine de corps !

Les survivants furent déportés au village de « l’île entre deux eaux ».Et c’est là que Wuhe [舞鹤] va séjourner en 1997 et 1998 pour enquêter sur les « Evènements de Musha ».

Jan 22, 2012 update:

Seediq Bale is one of 9 films to be shortlisted for this year’s

Best Foreign-language Film at the Academy Awards.

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When I studied at Taipei’s Normal University, students were fined for speaking Taiwanese (Táiyǔ) on campus. Refusing to use Mandarin, the tongue of Taiwan’s latest colonizers, was considered very politically incorrect. No doubt Chen Shui-Bian thought he was being cool when he campaigned for president flouting his Taiwanese, but all that is passé. Wei Te-sheng ( 魏德圣) has just shot a 4.5-hour epic about one Aboriginal tribe’s war of resistance against the Japanese in the 1930s, entirely in the Seediq language. Dean Napolitano at the Wall Street Journal reports: 

Taiwanese director Wei Te-sheng’s ambitious new movie is a 4.5-hour epic, filmed in an obscure tribal dialect with non-professional actors in key roles.

Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (赛德克‧巴莱) was filmed on a budget of $25 million. It is based on a true story — little known even in Taiwan — of Seediq tribes, who launched an armed rebellion in 1930 against Japanese colonial rule. The Japanese occupation of Taiwan began in 1895 and extended until its defeat in World War II.