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• 11/22-12/04 光點戲院接力放映～預售票券可以使用，不要再錯過囉！

  Thursday, Nov 12, 2009 4:03PM / Members only

  一席之地將於11/22～12/04在光點戲院接續放映，購買電影預售票來不及使用的觀眾，可以在這段放映期間使用，請大家把握場次購票觀賞，導演也會出席映後QA。

  放映時間如下：

  11/22（日）

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• 2009 Chicago International Film Festival

  Sunday, Nov 8, 2009 5:24PM / Members only

  A Place of One’s Own (Yi Shi Zhi De, 2009)
  Director: Lou Yi-an

  By Marilyn Ferdinand

  At last year’s CIFF, among the many embarrassingly dumb questions director Mike Leigh had to field in the Q&A following the screening of Happy-Go-Lucky was one about why the characters in his films always seem to be crammed into tiny living quarters. Leigh growled that the question could only have come from an American, with our sense of limitless space. Britain, he reminded us, is an island, and the land only goes so far.

  Taiwan is also an island, and Taipei, its largest city, is stuffed to the rafters with people, both living and dead. A Place of One’s Own, a deceptively rollicking film, is obsessed with housing both in the physical world and in the afterlife. Real-life political realities in Taipei—a year-long, unsuccessful protest over the displacement of about 300 people from a long-time leper colony and the demolition of their homes—provide a background for the meaning of place to the main characters whose fates intersect.

  Mozi (Mo Zi Yi), a punk rock star whose fortunes have fallen after a drug bust and the rise of techno music, is having more than his share of problems. He has defaulted on his mortgage and has to peddle his new CD by hand, while his live-in girlfriend and former bandmate Kasey (Lu Chia Hsin), is a fast-rising pop star. He also has to suffer the indignity of hiring a bass guitarist who says he idolized Mozi when he was a kid.

   

  Master Lin (Jack Kao) builds fabulous origami houses for the spirits of the dead after the houses are made incorporeal by burning; he’s just finishing one for a mobster whose son requests a gun in every one of the fabulously furnished rooms. Lin’s home and workshop rests on land his ancestors have occupied for generations but never owned. The son of one of Taipei’s wealthiest citizens comes to buy Master Lin’s home and demolish it; he intends to use the site for his dying father’s tomb because of its ideal feng shui and powerful chi. Lin refuses to sell, even though the government can simply seize the land at a lower price.

   

  Lin’s son Xiao Gang (Tang Zhen Gang) dresses in a tiger costume as part of his job to hand out fliers for a real estate company; he wears the costume while tooling around on his motor scooter to keep warm. His mother Yue (Yu Li Ching), who, for about $100, tends to graves for families who cannot get to the massive mountain cemetery near the Lins’ home and talks to spirits not yet at rest, tells Gang to get a real job. Gang, however, is a nerd who prefers to play computer games and whose vocabulary seems to consist only of “Oh” and “Huh.”

  Master Lin must have an operation to save his life; the government will cover the cost of surgery but not of the nutritional supplements he also must have. He figures the odds for his survival and decides that instead of wasting the money, he’ll finish his own origami house. Naturally, Gang doesn’t want his father to move into his paper house. Gang sells some valuable virtual real estate on his computer game for about $2,500. He also convinces his boss to give him a one-month try as a real estate salesman. A fortuitous encounter with the younger son of the dying mogul who will be buried on his ancestral land has him flipping properties the son buys, decorates, and sells for a profit. One of those properties of Mozi’s apartment.

  The fortunes of these characters rise and fall based on real and not-so-real estate, and the guiding principle is the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. Unlike Darryl Kerrigan in The Castle, Master Lin doesn’t fight city hall. He spends months making origami masterpieces that must be destroyed in order to be useful, so he’s especially in touch with the ephemeral nature of existence. Eventually we all lose our place. Sadly, it seems that in Taiwan, one even has to fight for a place in the afterlife.

   

  It’s hard to believe a film that deals so directly with death and homelessness can be so much fun, but it is. Except for Mozi’s story, which is mainly a sad depiction of the concern that the film’s title coincidentally evokes—Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own” for creating art—the characters are comic. Yue climbs through the cemetery talking to the air, but the plot suggests these spirits are real. Mo Zi Yi, a very nice young man who attended the screening with producer Ramy Choi, said that belief in an afterlife and its attendant notions of chi and feng shui are very real in Taiwan, so opening the story to this other dimension was nothing startling or done strictly for comic effect. Ironically, the film teems with life. I can't begin to describe all of the threads in this smart script and how little they seem contrived. This film is reminiscent of and compares favorably to those of another Taiwan filmmaker—the late, lamented Edward Yang.

  It wasn’t always easy to understand the episodic actions until they converged, but it was a treat trying to make sense of the culture-specific aspects of the film and marvel at the way these origami houses are constructed. I really felt like I had a wonderful, enlightening trip to Taipei with people I liked through the alternately fatalistic and funny A Place of One’s Own. Make a place for it in your festival schedule.

  Add a comment

• 2009 Chicago International Film Festival

  Sunday, Nov 8, 2009 5:24PM / Members only

  A Place of One’s Own (Yi Shi Zhi De, 2009)
  Director: Lou Yi-an

  By Marilyn Ferdinand

  At last year’s CIFF, among the many embarrassingly dumb questions director Mike Leigh had to field in the Q&A following the screening of Happy-Go-Lucky was one about why the characters in his films always seem to be crammed into tiny living quarters. Leigh growled that the question could only have come from an American, with our sense of limitless space. Britain, he reminded us, is an island, and the land only goes so far.

  Taiwan is also an island, and Taipei, its largest city, is stuffed to the rafters with people, both living and dead. A Place of One’s Own, a deceptively rollicking film, is obsessed with housing both in the physical world and in the afterlife. Real-life political realities in Taipei—a year-long, unsuccessful protest over the displacement of about 300 people from a long-time leper colony and the demolition of their homes—provide a background for the meaning of place to the main characters whose fates intersect.

  Mozi (Mo Zi Yi), a punk rock star whose fortunes have fallen after a drug bust and the rise of techno music, is having more than his share of problems. He has defaulted on his mortgage and has to peddle his new CD by hand, while his live-in girlfriend and former bandmate Kasey (Lu Chia Hsin), is a fast-rising pop star. He also has to suffer the indignity of hiring a bass guitarist who says he idolized Mozi when he was a kid.

   

  Master Lin (Jack Kao) builds fabulous origami houses for the spirits of the dead after the houses are made incorporeal by burning; he’s just finishing one for a mobster whose son requests a gun in every one of the fabulously furnished rooms. Lin’s home and workshop rests on land his ancestors have occupied for generations but never owned. The son of one of Taipei’s wealthiest citizens comes to buy Master Lin’s home and demolish it; he intends to use the site for his dying father’s tomb because of its ideal feng shui and powerful chi. Lin refuses to sell, even though the government can simply seize the land at a lower price.

   

  Lin’s son Xiao Gang (Tang Zhen Gang) dresses in a tiger costume as part of his job to hand out fliers for a real estate company; he wears the costume while tooling around on his motor scooter to keep warm. His mother Yue (Yu Li Ching), who, for about $100, tends to graves for families who cannot get to the massive mountain cemetery near the Lins’ home and talks to spirits not yet at rest, tells Gang to get a real job. Gang, however, is a nerd who prefers to play computer games and whose vocabulary seems to consist only of “Oh” and “Huh.”

  Master Lin must have an operation to save his life; the government will cover the cost of surgery but not of the nutritional supplements he also must have. He figures the odds for his survival and decides that instead of wasting the money, he’ll finish his own origami house. Naturally, Gang doesn’t want his father to move into his paper house. Gang sells some valuable virtual real estate on his computer game for about $2,500. He also convinces his boss to give him a one-month try as a real estate salesman. A fortuitous encounter with the younger son of the dying mogul who will be buried on his ancestral land has him flipping properties the son buys, decorates, and sells for a profit. One of those properties of Mozi’s apartment.

  The fortunes of these characters rise and fall based on real and not-so-real estate, and the guiding principle is the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. Unlike Darryl Kerrigan in The Castle, Master Lin doesn’t fight city hall. He spends months making origami masterpieces that must be destroyed in order to be useful, so he’s especially in touch with the ephemeral nature of existence. Eventually we all lose our place. Sadly, it seems that in Taiwan, one even has to fight for a place in the afterlife.

   

  It’s hard to believe a film that deals so directly with death and homelessness can be so much fun, but it is. Except for Mozi’s story, which is mainly a sad depiction of the concern that the film’s title coincidentally evokes—Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own” for creating art—the characters are comic. Yue climbs through the cemetery talking to the air, but the plot suggests these spirits are real. Mo Zi Yi, a very nice young man who attended the screening with producer Ramy Choi, said that belief in an afterlife and its attendant notions of chi and feng shui are very real in Taiwan, so opening the story to this other dimension was nothing startling or done strictly for comic effect. Ironically, the film teems with life. I can't begin to describe all of the threads in this smart script and how little they seem contrived. This film is reminiscent of and compares favorably to those of another Taiwan filmmaker—the late, lamented Edward Yang.

  It wasn’t always easy to understand the episodic actions until they converged, but it was a treat trying to make sense of the culture-specific aspects of the film and marvel at the way these origami houses are constructed. I really felt like I had a wonderful, enlightening trip to Taipei with people I liked through the alternately fatalistic and funny A Place of One’s Own. Make a place for it in your festival schedule.

  Add a comment

• Flynn takes UK rights to Taiwanese drama

  Saturday, Nov 7, 2009 5:23PM / Members only

  7 October, 2009 | By Jean Noh (Screen International)

  London-based Flynn Entertainment has acquired Ian Lou’s award-winning Taiwanese film A Place Of One’s Own for UK theatrical release in spring 2010.

  The deal was negotiated by Steven Flynn, president of Flynn Entertainment, and Ramy Choi, president of production and sales outfit Fame Universal Entertainment.

  Set against the competitive landscape of Taipei City, A Place Of One’s Own is a dark comedy written and directed by Ian Lou and produced by Singing Chen, who previously directed God Man Dog.

  The film stars Mo Tzu Yi (The Most Distant Course) as a struggling rock musician and Jack Kao (Shinjuku Incident) as an origami artisan, both facing the issues of defining their identities and relationships to the place they inhabit. When their lives unexpectedly collide, each is forced to make decisions that will mean the difference between life and death for each other.

  “This is really a wonderful acquisition for our young company,” said Steven Flynn. “It’s an excellent story, beautifully told, visually stunning, and I am sure it will charm audiences over here in the UK as it has in Asia.”

  A Place of One’s Own won the Audience Award, Best Supporting Actress and Best Production Design at this year’s Taipei International Film Festival and has been invited to the upcoming Chicago and Hawaii international film festivals.

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• Taiwan Cinefest London

  Friday, Nov 6, 2009 5:22PM / Members only

  “A film that nourishes heart and mind”

  Steven Flynn, Festival Director

  London –  24.8.09

  Lou Yi-an’s “A Place of One’s Own” is an ambitious film that attempts to weave an intricate series of stories and character sub-plots bound around the somewhat abstract theme of one’s need to be defined by the space they inhabit and their possession of it.   This approach slots nicely with being able to compare and explore the issues of Aboriginal social dispossession alongside the alienation and cold, hard nosed competition endured by the young  in Taipei. 

  For all its weighty subjects and multilayered storytelling “A Place of One’s Own” moves swiftly along due to its well structured script and some of the best performances to come out this year.  Unlike some of Taiwan’s more recent high profile art house releases, Ian Lou seems unafraid to allow his audience an opportunity to engage more emotionally with the rather off-beat selection of characters played by some of Taiwan’s most established talent.   Jack Kao plays Lin, an origami artisan who creates some of the finest paper houses burned as funeral offerings.  Kao plays Lin masterfully with a blend of honesty, humor and vulnerability alongside Lu Yi Ching, his grave sweeper wife to create some of the more meaningful and moving exchanges of the film. 

  Mo Tzu-yi plays one-time super bandleader Mozi whose career has flamed out after being caught possessing hash and now faces a life heavily in debt and the prospect of homelessness.  Perhaps one of the more understated roles in the film, Mo Tzu-yi avoids easy caricature and puts in a thoughtful and moody performance of Mozi that indicates a sense of depth and maturity in the fast rising young actor.  

  The deft art direction and innovative production design offer Western audiences a rare glimpse of traditional arts and crafts of Taiwan through the magnificent funeral paper houses used in the film.  This is all captured expertly by Shen Ko-Shang’s cinematography which gives the film a beautiful soft texture and intimate feeling.

  “A Place of One’s Own” is a film that foreign audiences will delight in with its accessible and universally relevant themes, melodic soundtrack and unique characters that make you think long after the lights have went up.

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