Film Note: Cape No.7 （海角七號）         by Ming-Yeh Rawnsley

• Relevant articles: (1) 來自賽德克巴萊劇組的一封信(李喻婷) ; (2) Press Release: Taiwan Film Evening; and (3) Taiwan Film Festival: Free Screening and Post-screening Discussion of Cape No.7.

Introduction

I first heard about the film, Cape No.7(海角七號, Hai jiao qi hao) in the autumn of 2008. It was the most talked-about Taiwanese film on the island, not only in 2008, but also in the history of Taiwan cinema to date.[1] I finally got to watch it at a film festival in London in February 2009 and it did not disappoint. Thanks to the festival organizer, the Taipei Representative Office in the UK, I also had the opportunity to attend the press conference and to conduct a private interview with the filmmaker, Wei Te-sheng (魏德聖, Wei Desheng).

(photo taken by Stephen Flynn, 21 February 2009, London)

        As Taiwan’s film critic Michael Mai has commented: ‘Taiwanese movies haven't made me feel so good for a long time until Cape No.7. All the characters are so vividly portrayed and their relationships so well presented.’ Mai said, ‘I always hope that local movies can equal Hollywood productions and now I've finally found a Taiwanese director that can create a movie of real commercial value’ (Chung, 6 February 2009). Indeed, the popularity of Cape No.7 comes from its commercial appeal and the feel-good factor; but on a deeper level, the film also deals with a light touch the complexity of modern Taiwan and the shadow of its history. Hence local viewers are able to respond to the film and to make their own personal interpretations.

I must admit that Cape No.7 is not the best Taiwanese film I have seen. Its cinematic language is not the most innovative, nor is the character development flawless. Nevertheless it is an excellent movie, and it is particularly important at this juncture for the Taiwan film industry. Its depiction of the island’s people, atmosphere, local politics and colonial history can charm and move audiences who have never watched Taiwan cinema. It can also delight viewers who are familiar with Taiwan cinema through portraying the kind of raw energy and fun that is part of daily life in Taiwan and yet has been rarely reflected in movies locally produced since the late 1980s.

The purpose of this article is two-fold. First, it will provide background information on the film to help readers who are unfamiliar with Taiwan and Taiwan cinema to further understand why and how a movie such as Cape No.7 has created such an explosion of interest and popularity on the island. Secondly, Wei Te-sheng revealed in the London press conference and in his interview with me how he cleverly and successfully marketed the movie with a limited budget. His inventive strategy offers a valuable insight on the current state of the Taiwan film industry. 

Background Information to Cape No.7       

I.                   About Taiwan: Geography and History

Taiwan is an island off the east coast of the Chinese mainland. It is shaped like a tobacco leaf, 250 miles long and 80 miles wide at its broadest point. The strait which separates Taiwan from mainland China is just over 100 miles wide. Taiwan’s population today is 23 million, double that of Belgium and half as big as the Netherlands.

Taiwan’s earliest inhabitants were the ‘aboriginals’ who now occupy around 1.7% of Taiwan’s modern population. The overwhelming majority of the people on Taiwan, the ‘Taiwanese’ (73%) and the ‘Hakkas’ (12%), migrated from southern provinces of China, mainly Fujian and Guangdong, several centuries ago. Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895 and then was returned to the Republic of China by the Allies in 1945 at the end of the Second World War (Scott and Tiun, 2007: 54).

The Chinese Civil War between 1945 and 1949 saw the Nationalist government under the Kuomintang (KMT), led by Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), defeated by the Communist government, led by Mao Zedong. Two million civilians and soldiers from all over China retreated to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, forming the latest immigrant group on the island, the so-called ‘Mainlanders’ (13%) (ibid). Thereafter the KMT created an authoritarian system of one-party rule.

Taiwan experienced political and social democratization in the 1980s and the 1990s. Today the central government and all levels of local governments are directly elected by the citizens of Taiwan. The official language is Mandarin. However most people on Taiwan are equally fluent in Mandarin and one local language – that is, the Taiwanese, the Hakka or aboriginal languages. Cape No.7 reflects the multi-lingual reality of Taiwan and uses several languages in the film dialogues.   

II.                About the Film: Cape No.7 (2008/Taiwan/Colour/129min./35mm)

The film is set in the present day in a small town in southern Taiwan, Hengchun (literally ‘forever spring’). It is a sleepy seaside town with a beautiful beach. On the one hand, the residents of Hengchun are generally conservative with traditional values, and yet on the other hand, one can see international tourists in bikinis walking on the street during the holiday season. The town also holds an annual rock concert on the beach to attract visitors. The director and scriptwriter, Wei Te-sheng, chose Hengchun as the backdrop of this film precisely because of the interesting contrast the town offers.[2]

Another contrast in the film comes from its parallel storylines – the local residents of Hengchun decide to form a local rock band three weeks before the concert begins. The lead vocal singer of this new band, Aga, is a substitute postman. He discovers a package of undelivered love letters written in Japanese from the colonial period. The letters are addressed to ‘Cape No.7’, an address in 1940s Taiwan which no longer exists. However, Aga finally delivers the letters just before he goes on stage to perform his music. While the Japanese writer of the love letters had to leave his Taiwanese lover in 1945, Aga is able to persuade his Japanese girlfriend to stay with him.

Providing a lavish presentation of southern Taiwan's breathtaking scenery, Cape No.7 also explores the unwavering pursuits of music, dreams and love intertwined with themes of generational differences, cultural diversity and small town life.

Cape No.7 is the highest grossing film ever produced in Taiwan and is on its way to becoming the highest-grossing film ever in Taiwanese box-office history surpassing even the international blockbuster Titanic (1997). It was the official Taiwanese entry for the 81^st Academy Awards with nine nominations including Best Picture and Best Director. Although the film failed to win over the judges of the Academy Awards, it has received numerous awards in Taiwan and overseas, including: Audience Choice Award (10^th Taipei Film Festival), Grand Prize, Best Music, and Best Cinematography (2008 Taipei Awards), Grand Prize (4^th AMFFM, Japan), Best Narrative Feature (28^th Hawaii International Film Festival), Best Cinematography (Kuala Lumpur International Film Festival 2008), Best Supporting Actor, Best Original Film Score, Best Original Film Song and Best Audience Award (45th Annual Golden Horse Awards, 2008, Taiwan).[3]

III.             About the Cast

In a press conference in London, Wei Te-sheng revealed that all the actors in the band are real musicians except the young girl who plays the keyboard because he wanted the main characters to have real connection with their musical instruments and to show true passion about performing on stage. Moreover, Wei said that many of the actors in the film used to be famous and successful in their career, but their fame waned. By the time Wei approached them, most of the actors were frustrated artists. He believed that the energy of the film may have come from the fact that the cast tried to release the long-term frustration they have suffered from through their best performance.[4]

For example, the leading man, Van Fan, who plays the lead vocal of the band, Aga, made his name when singing the theme song ‘I Believe’ for the popular Korean film, My Sassy Girl (2001), and released his first album in 2002. Van’s fame waned until he appeared in Cape No.7, his first feature film. The leading actress, Tanaka Chie, who plays the local coordinator from Japan, Tomoko, worked in the Japanese film industry for several years. Her film credits include Ping Pong (2002), Initial D (2005) and Spring Snow (2005). However she only had walk-on parts or a few lines at best. Because of her ability to speak Mandarin, Tanaka Chie was chosen to star in Cape No.7 and was finally able to play a leading role in a feature film.[5] 

IV.             About the Director/Scriptwriter: Wei Te-sheng

Born in 1969, Wei Te-Sheng’s film career began when he found a job in a small production company. In 1995, he became grip assistant in Edward Yang’s (Yang Dechang) film studio, and at the time Yang was filming Mahjong (1996), Wei was promoted to assistant director. Between 1995 and 1998, Wei shot a number of short films including Face in the Evening (1995), Three Dialogues (1996) and Before Dawn (1997), all of which won the Golden Harvest Award for Film and Digital Video. His first feature film, About July (1999), was well received by film critics in Taiwan and was honoured with a Special Mention from the Alcan Dragons and Tigers Award for Young Cinema at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Wei was also the associate producer of Double Vision (2002).

(photo taken by Ming-Yeh Rawnsley, 20 February 2009, London)

Wei’s ambition is to shoot a Taiwanese historical epic that he wrote, Seediq Bale, which is about an aboriginal tribe’s campaign of resistance during the Japanese colonial period. The project is estimated to cost US$ 10 million. Wei raised US$ 7700 in 2004 to shoot a trailer for this film. The richness of the scenery and the epic atmosphere presented in the trailer surprised and amazed the world of Taiwanese cinema, showing Wei’s unquestionable ability to create big budget productions (Chen, 8 September 2008). Meanwhile, Wei wrote and filmed Cape No.7 which demonstrated his commercial value and his ability to attract audiences. Seediq Bale is his next production project which will begin shooting in October 2009 (Li, 27 April 2009). 

V.                The Current State of Taiwan Cinema

Filmmakers from Taiwan have made a significant impression on the international arena since the 1980s. Not only have established movie directors such as Hou Hsiao-Hsien (Hou Xiaoxian), Tsai Ming-liang (Cai Mingliang) and Edward Yang (Yang Dechang, who passed away in 2007) often won major international film awards, but young talents have also produced outstanding feature films, short films and documentaries that attract attention on the international film circuit.

(Tsai Ming-liang. Photo taken by Ming-Yeh Rawnsley, 16 November 2007, London)

However, while the ‘Taiwan New Cinema’ of the early 1980s has produced many cutting edge cinematic works in terms of their style and subject matter, the strong art-house tendency has gradually lost the support of local viewers (Berry and Lu, 2005: 6). Taiwan has been ‘one of the most prosperous film markets in Asia and one of the ten largest film markets in the world’ for Hollywood productions (Curtin, 2007: 86), but in contrast, locally produced feature films number less than 20 each year, many of which do not have the opportunity to obtain theatrical release in Taiwan. If they do, they have usually disappeared from cinemas within a week.

As Oscar Chung (6 February 2009) has revealed in his report: 

[F]or nine out of the 11 years from 1996 to 2006 the yearly revenue from Taiwanese movies accounted for less than 2 percent of total ticket sales in Taiwan… The lion’s share of total box office income, more than 90 percent, was for foreign-language movies, mostly English-language films from Hollywood. The situation for local films reached its nadir in 2003 when just 18 Taiwanese feature films were produced, with their total revenue accounting for a mere 0.3 percent of all ticket sales.  

Therefore the box-office success of Cape No.7 is particularly significant to Taiwan’s film industry. It is a locally produced commercial film that the local audiences have been waiting for over two decades to see. Its popularity proves that there is a local market for Taiwanese commercial cinema, and it demonstrates that there is talent in Taiwan that is capable of producing financially viable films in addition to art-house cinema. Moreover, Cape No.7 has restored the faith of audiences, investors and theatre owners in local cinema. Several locally produced films in the same year, such as Orz Boyz (2008) and Winds of September (2008), enjoyed a re-run in cinemas after Cape No.7 and all performed solidly in the box-office. Cape No.7 has certainly rekindled some hope of a renaissance in Taiwan cinema.

 Interview with Wei Te-sheng[6]

According to Wei Te-sheng, the success of Cape No.7 was not left to chance. The quality and the broad appeal of the film are of course essential to its popularity. However if there were no channels for its release, audiences would not even have the opportunity to decide whether they like the film or not. Given that most theatre owners in Taiwan are very suspicious of locally produced movies, it was very likely that Cape No.7 would have met the same resistance from theatre owners as other Taiwanese films.

Wei Te-sheng and his crew devised three important strategies which proved to be critical to the commercial success of the film. Firstly, they decided to contact the Taiwan branch of Disney and see if they would be interested in distributing Cape No.7. Wei left the rough cut version of the film with the company. The next day Wei received a phone call telling him that everyone within the company watched the film and loved it. Based on this overwhelmingly successful result, the Taiwan branch of Disney agreed to distribute Cape No.7 nation-wide.

Secondly, before the official release schedules were finalized, Wei accepted Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s advice that Cape No.7 should be able to rise to the challenge of a free screening to spread word about the film. However, Wei was very clever in choosing his targeted audience. As he has admitted, his company arranged several free screenings around the island prior to the official release of the film. They issued invitations mainly to headmasters of primary schools and local representatives such as heads of small districts and townships. Wei said:

These people are seldom invited to attend such events. We feel that they will appreciate the invitation more than other social and cultural leaders and thus it is more likely that they will make themselves available to the screening. Moreover, these people are natural communicators. Their position demands them to make contact and communicate with general public around them. So we believe it is more likely that they will tell the others about the film especially if they enjoy it.

The free screenings seem to have worked because Cape No.7 attracted serious attention very quickly. The more it was discussed, the more the media covered it and the more audiences wanted to see it. While Wei is very pleased with the outcome, he does regret that his company did not think about surveying the audiences during the first two weeks of the official release to learn how people heard about the film and why they decided to see it. ‘If we did a survey then,’ said Wei, ‘we would have learned more about the effect of the free screenings and perhaps how the strategy may work more effectively in the future.’

Third, web users have been identified as the most important promoters of the film. Based on the box-office figures in Taipei, the commercial success of Cape No.7 was modest during its first few weeks of release (Cape No.7 Official Blog, n.d.). Yet with the help of blogs and PTT[7], Cape No.7 eventually became a ‘must-see’ event movie in Taiwan and enjoyed a record-breaking box-office performance (Tzara, 7 September 2008). Further, when Cape No.7 became a hit, there were many websites, beyond the control of the film-maker’s company, which allowed internet users to download the film for free. Although the executive producer of Cape No.7, Jimmy Huang, believed that it is an honour for a local film to be widely pirated (Chung, 6 February 2009), Wei thinks it is even more of an honour when many web managers voluntarily set up a mechanism that prevented users from downloading Cape No.7 illegally. These managers announced on their sites: ‘Cape No.7 is Taiwan’s pride.’

Conclusion

It is difficult to expect that the Taiwan film industry will be revived by the success of one film. It is equally hard to imagine that the audiences will flock into the theatres to see every single locally produced cinema in the future. However, the popularity of Cape No.7 has inspired filmmakers and investors that there is a market for Taiwanese commercial cinema in Taiwan. It also proves to the local audiences that there are talented artists in Taiwan who are capable of producing commercial films with mass appeal in addition to making art-house movies which can win awards at international film festivals. It is important to encourage both types of films and filmmakers if a film industry is to be viable and sustainable in both financial and artistic terms.