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Love in the Time of ‘White Terror’
DUBAI — Politics can make for mind-numbing changes, and the helplessness of ordinary individual caught in the tide of change, has always been a favourite theme for filmmakers, especially those who want to pursue the power of reality bites.
Prince of Tears, a Taiwan/Hong Kong production screening today at 7 pm at Cinestar 11 belongs to this league. But what makes this epic movie memorable is how director Yonfan, a veteran with 11 other films to his credit, weaves into this period drama, dollops of love and friendship. In many ways, the movie set in the 1950s in Taiwan, during an era known as the ‘White Terror’ could also have some autobiographical elements. Writer-director Yonfan was born in the Hunan Province in China and moved with his parents to Taiwan in 1952.
Although he subsequently moved to Hong King, now his home-base, the impressions of Taiwan in the 1950s could be festering, as the story-line of Prince of Tears suggests.
Living through turbulent times, when an anti-Communist campaign swept through Taiwan, two sisters return home from school to find their once-happy home ransacked by the military police. Their parents are arrested and are accused of being Communist spies.
In the narrative that follows, tracking four lives, there is love, friendship, passion, high ideals and dignity – all put to trial, as Yonfan describes it, “in the courtroom of human desire.”
Yonfan rose to prominence with his film Bishonen, which was screened to great critical acclaim at the Berlin Panorama in 1999. Prince of Tears is the first movie he made in Taiwan, although it is his 12th feature. The film was shot over three years – as much time it took for ‘City of Life,’ the UAE film that made its premiere at DIFF on Friday.
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