-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Luke Robinson, Midi Z, network aesthetics from below, and the cultural politics of Taiwanese subimperialism, Screen, Volume 61, Issue 1, Spring 2020, Pages 98–118, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjaa002
- Share Icon Share
Extract
On 9 September 2014, Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture (MoC) announced its entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2015 Academy Awards. The government’s choice was Bingdu/Ice Poison (2014), directed by the Myanmar-born but Taiwan-based filmmaker Zhao Deyin, better known as Midi Z. Described by the MoC’s press release as ‘a brutally honest take on the day-to-day reality in his homeland Myanmar’,1 Ice Poison beat off features by more high-profile directors. These included Tsai Ming-liang’s Jiao you/Stray Dogs (2013) and Umin Boya’s feel-good sports film about a 1930s Taiwanese high-school baseball team, Kano (2014), which was produced by the current doyenne of popular genre cinema in Taiwan, Wei Te-sheng. According to the government publication Taiwan Today, Zhao’s film stood out due to the power of its documentary realism in conveying the life of a poor farmer who turns to selling crystal meth for cash.2 Not unconnectedly, it was also reported that Ang Lee, having seen the film at the Tribeca Film Festival, commented that Ice Poison had ‘inherited the aesthetic style of Taiwan’s New Wave school of film yet uses the linear narrative structure of the world’s mainstream film’.3