Happiness Building 1

Chen Chieh-jen asked Taiwanese born in the 1980s to write about their lives. From their prose and poetry, the filmmaker constructed his panoramic, subversive look at a country that has changed radically since the neoliberal reforms of 1984. The easing of restrictions on sacking employees and the dismantlement of social programmes and housing rights have created an insecure society that fears the future.
To show this individualised world, the film presents the occupants of an apartment building soon to be demolished: an unemployed single woman, a lesbian whose father committed suicide, a handicapped actor who does performances of ‘standing still silently’ as a form of protest. Not only state companies have been privatised thanks to the neoliberal ideology. The lives and vicissitudes of a new generation of Taiwanese have also become completely disjointed. Contrived freedom, under the motto ‘everyone for themselves and no one for all of us’.

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