Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on laptop.
If I were a film student, I think I would strongly consider doing a dissertation on the cinema of oppression. It’s interesting, I think, how people react to films about the oppression of others. I think often we are more upset about the stories we don’t know and aren’t familiar with than with the ones that are more culturally our own. It’s probably from surprise. I’m not yet inured to the Holocaust despite having seen more than my share of films about it. The enormity of the event prevents me from ever really having a “been there, done that” attitude. And yet I find myself often more moved by stories of social evils and people buried under the weight of their wicked governments that I was not familiar with before watching. Why is this? I think it has something to do with familiarity. I know where a Holocaust film is going. I didn’t know enough about what happened in Taiwan post-World War II to really know much about Bei Qing Cheng Shi (A City of Sadness).
I knew nothing of what happened in Taiwan after it was given back to Mainland China after the war. As such, I had no idea what to expect or what kind of human injustice would crop up agains the people in this story. The film tells the story of a single family living in Taiwan after its return to Chinese rule following the war. Immediately there is corruption and trouble. While the people appear to be happy to be free of Japanese rule, the begin to see that not everything is as good as it once was. Food becomes scarce, and the systematic oppression of the people, particularly those sent to Taiwan by Chang Kai-shek becomes the norm.
