You yi tian/One Day
Hou Chi-Jan, Taiwan
2010, 93 min
World Premiere
15 February 2010
Delphi Filmpalast, Berlin
Cast: Nikki Hsin-Ying Hsieh (Singing), Bryan Shu-Hao Chang (Tsung), Gwen Yao (Mutter), Hu Huan-Wei, Jishnu Prasad.
A wholly original film. Director Hou Chi-Jan’s first feature, made with stylistic assurance and artistic courage. One of eight debuts in Forum competing for this year’s Best First Feature prize.
Singing (Nikki Hsin-Ying Hsieh) lives with her mother in a shop in the waterfront city of Kaohsiung, on Taiwan. In a constantly recurring dream she meets a man whose face she cannot discern and whose words she cannot hear. He may be her father, who disappeared into thin air during a sea voyage. She works on a ferry carrying Taiwanese soldiers to remote Kinmen Island, off the coast of Fujian Province in mainland China. On deck, she observes a young soldier, Tsung (Bryan Shu-Hao), his strong, delicate, finely shaped arm.
A typhoon is approaching; Michael Jackson has just died. As the ferry cuts the sea in moonlight, the soldiers sleep in their compartments. Suddenly the engines go silent, the lights extinguished. Singing and Tsung are alone, pursued by a strange South Asian man wielding an axe (Jishnu Prasad).
Rows of silently sleeping students, dreaming. In a dimly lit, window-less study center near the Taipei train station, they prepare for exams, isolated at desks in cubicles, spending as much time with heads down napping as studying. Dreams overlap, breaking story and time. Tsung and Singing meet and re-meet, sometimes together in multiple points in time, sometimes in multiple realities.
Singing lives by the sea but doesn’t know how to swim. Tsung has a beautiful swimmer’s body, like a knife in water. She loves to watch him, imagining her vanished father, swimming in eternity.
“You don’t have to give up happiness today for an unknown future.”
Director Hou Chi-Jan:
“When I was twenty-two, I drew the short straw for my military service, and was posted to Kinmen…. Before assuming that assignment, I was dispatched to a hillside military base in Kaohsiung to guard the ship bound for Kinmen. Every night on sentry duty, I would sneak out to make a phone call, a call that was never answered. Hearing the continuous ringing, I gazed at the distant light glowing from Kaohsiung city, which lay quietly at the bottom of the hill. Those were the moments when I felt the loneliness of youth and the intangible nature of love.
“I eventually boarded the ship for Kinmen. Apart from the sound of the waves at night, my only companions were A-mei’s song, “Listen to the Sea,” and the radio songs of Faye Wong. Years later, I began to tell stories in which the study center, the military base, the boat and the sea kept changing, extending, expanding and linking up with each other in my reconstructed, repeated memories. In the end, everything was pieced together and it is from there that this film, One Day, was born.”
Film as hallucinogen, languid but never boring. By the end, none of the streams can be pinpointed as reality. “The whole world must be dreaming right now.”
Quite wonderful performances from Nikki Hsin-Ying Hsieh and Bryan Shu-Hao Chang, complemented by a deeply meditative piano score by Han Cheng-Ye and played by Tsai Yi-Chun.
Visit the Berlinale website.