Two years ago, the Rotterdam festival screened Wu Nien-jen’s impressive directing début A Borrowed Life, in which the director looks back on the period of the decline of Taiwanese gold mines after the thirties. In Buddha Bless America Wu again returns to the past, the late sixties, but this time the themes are tackled in a more comic way.Lin Wen-sheng (nicknamed ‘Brain’), the only inventive person in a farming community, has been sacked as teacher at a primary school. He has a younger brother who lost his left hand in anaccident with a machine. After reading an article about microsurgery, Brain tells his brother that, thanks to American technology, one day he will get his fingers back. A few days later the villagers hear that a joint military exercise between Taiwan and the US is about to be held in their area. ‘Brain’ is asked by the government to use his influence to make the villagers cooperate. When the military operation ruins all the crops, the villagers cool their anger on Brain. He resolves to take something big off the Americans to regain his reputation in the village. With his brother he steals two large metal chests and finds two dead American soldiers in them. They dump the chests and pray to Buddha that the two Americans will have a propitious journey to the Western Paradise…
