Romance at Lung Shan Temple

Mainland Chinese were not necessarily well liked in Taiwan after the KMT under Chiang Kai-shek fled there after its defeat in the Civil War against Communist forces, under Mao Zedong. The Republic of China installed itself as a new, sometimes brutally racist regime that suppressed the island’s indigenous population.

Making a popular musical comedy on racial and social tensions was therefore quite a daring endeavour. But director Pai Ko was used to such challenges; his cinema often dealt with questions of tolerance and forgiveness as the key to a society no longer divided. In Romance at Lung Shan Temple, it is a girl from the mainland who finds herself ostracised by the locals when she wants to sell medicine at a temple to make some money for her ailing father. When she is chased away and looking for a job, two gentlemen enter her life, each offering a perfect career trajectory.

Maybe this cheerful, innocuous-looking musical comedy was too radical in its way? Soon after finishing it, Pai Ko was arrested, tried as a communist spy, and executed two years later – becoming another of the thousands of victims of Taiwan’s White Terror. If you would like to know more about this period, do check out Zero Chou’s Untold Herstory, also screening at IFFR.

– Olaf Möller