Three female convicts transferred to the New Life Correction Center for communists and traitors on Green Island (formerly known as Bonfire Island) are subjected to unspeakable humiliation and abuse in Zero Chou's dark drama “Untold Herstory”, that has just had its European premiere at IFFR. The year is 1953, and the White Terror period is in full swing. Many people, most of them students, are being apprehended for innocent offenses such as saying something wrong, reading banned (mainly leftist) books, or for being related or befriended to the ‘enemies of the state'. Some are being reported as spies as a spiteful act of retaliation, and others for refusing men's advances. Only few can call themselves guilty, if being a communist is still considered a crime.
Untold Her Story screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam
“Untold Herstory” pulls many tricks out of the epic historical dramas hat: we've got a melodramatic score, a heartbreak, a naive, good-hearted girl with teary eyes, the goody good and the bady bad, but that's a universal recipe for a movie that is meant to attract large audiences. Important to underline is that the film addresses a sensitive topic, considering that the Green Island was a taboo for a very long time; the survivors were treated with scorn, and even spied on by the government long after their release. The unwillingness to discuss what was going on in the camp lasted a while, even after the White Terror period was over. “Untold Herstory” is inspired by Cao Qinrong's book “Liumagou N°15: Green Island Girls Team and others” about the lives of five women who went through hell of the infamous “re-educational camp”. Since one of them was executed while serving her time, the book is based on interviews with the survivors and their personal letters and official documents from the time. Borrowing ideas and details depicted in the book, Chou created her own story with different characters who do bear similarities with the survivors, but are fictive.
The film opens with the arrival of a brand-new, all-female group of inmates accused of “being fooled by the treacherous communist bandits to go astray”. One young woman seems particularly petrified, and when she stumbles and falls in the rough sea in the establishing shot, she is being pulled out and hauled off to the group. The woman's name is Kyoko (Yu Pei-jen), soon to become N° 172, as no prisoner on the island is supposed to be called by their name.
Kyoko and her island friends – the dancer Chen Ping (Cindy Lien) and the nurse Yen Shui-hsia (Herb Hsu) are placed in barracks watched over by female military guards. Different in character and the way they deal with the imprisonment, they are helping each other to endure the torture and hard labor. The cast choice proves excellent, particularly in case of Cindy Lien with her portrait of a woman who's blackmailed into staying where she is.
There is not a grain of kindness in the camp, and the prisoners – dressed in drab uniforms – are punished for any small mistake by being denied a meal. The whole island is drained of color, and the overwhelming grayness of the camp surrounded by the colorless sea, battered by wind and rain, is caught by the mercilessly observant lense of the cinematographer Hoho Liu, whose OTS intensify the sense of being there. Owing to Eugeni Juan's set design, costumes, and dedication to details regarding historical facts, there is a great sense of authenticity: we got to see and hear the prisoners perform patriotic songs, and the men from high military ranks talk about the internal disputes between Kuomintang and the princeling CCK's faction. For someone unacquainted with the Taiwanese history, there may come to a bit of confusion regarding the whole “re-education” of communist spies, when both the looks and the methods of the soldiers very much remind of – the communists.
Zero Chou is in Rotterdam for the second time. Her short “Viva Taiwan Mooooovie” was shown in the Spectrum: Shorts program back in 2009. “Untold Herstory” is her seventh feature film, and before its European premiere it was the opener of the Kaohsiung Film Festival back in October.
