Taiwan Church News

3215 Edition

October 7 - October 13, 2013

Church Ministry News

Reported by Lin Yi-ying

"A gift from the Sky — The Tragedy of Hsiaolin Village, Part 2", a documentary directed by Lo Shin-chieh and his wife WangHsiu-ling, was nominated as one of 15 candidates to compete the famous Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival from October 10 to 17. There are 1,761 documentaries from 123 countries attending this film festival this year, and "A gift from the Sky" is the only one entry using Chinese language.

More than 600 people of Hsiaolin Village in the Kaohsiung area were buried alive by a catastrophic Morakot typhoon mudslidethat wiped out a large part of the village on Aug. 8, 2009. "A gift from the sky" recorded in video the spiritual sojourn how six couples engaged to find a way out within this trauma. Either by traditional folk religious liturgy - "Kuan Loh Inn", recalling the loved ones from the hell, or by delving into giving birth of the child, these expressions show how the survived were struggling to placate the souls in suffering.

Through the images, this director couple also wish to expose various kinds of interest conflicts and human greed after volumeresources flooded into the inflicted area. There were violent stand-offs within the survived villagers; blind motifs and cunning ideologies between the government, religious group and the financial conglomerate.

Regarding the restored "Hsiaolin Evening Sacrifice Festival", a Plain-Aboriginal liturgy initiated by the residents ofHsiaolin Village after the Morakot Typhoon mudslide, Director Lo made a sharp critique through interviews and pictures that it is nothing more than a common activity to earn living for the survived. The real purpose is to raise money from the government.

Though this film had received aid from The Foundation of National Art and Culture, Director Lo said this grant has neverdominated his original intention to criticize the incompetence of Ma administration. He always thought, from the very beginning he shot "A Gift for Father’s Day — The Tragedy of Hsiaolin Village, Part 1" till "A gift from the Sky — The Tragedy of Hsiaolin Village, Part 2", the catastrophic thing to cause this Morakot Typhoon Mudslide was the ill-judged engineering plan to induce water across the nearby hills.

Translated by Peter Wolfe