The Tunnel

An elderly man cooks himself some noodles and eats them straight from the pot while watching TV by himself. He dozes off at his job as a security guard. Alone since the death of his wife, the father’s daily life is filmed by his daughter. While turning her gaze on ordinary things like garbage, keys, puppies, flies and lizards, we can almost sense the strong smells of summer and the sound of thunder at night. Suddenly, the father turns and waves to us. The father-daughter bond is expressed here in very few words.

Hard Good Life II is a work that comes from the heart. Since the director learned how to hold a camera, she had gazed at her father through the lens all the time. This film is a memory of her father. After her father got cancer, they went through all kinds of treatment together, including loss or gain, hope or sorrow. This unbreakable connection supported them to the very last moment and never faded away.

The film begins with a conversation with the grandmother, tracing back the gentle, intricate, bittersweet, and hard-to-express emotions between mother and daughter. It moves between the reality of daily life and the imagined scenes from memories.

This documentary tells the sorrow and helplessness faced by villagers in Nansalu Village (Ming Tribe) of Namaxia Township at southern Taiwan, a hard-hit area by typhoon Morakot. The twelve short stories about homes depict the kind of emotional entanglement experienced by the tribal people after going through a drastic disaster. These stories portray the cruelty of reality and allow the audience to see how it forges endurance of life.

The factories which were abandoned, the temporaries who were employed on a temporary basis, and the words were painted on the edge of the wall of the city. They were dirty humble but very strong, it reflects the real situation of "workers" in the social class. These factories, workers, and wall were utterly discarded after being used up, without any responsibility and affection. They were "relics" of the modern industrial process, and now left behind in the edge of the city and barren. We try to record the imminent disappearance of these graffiti walls, abandoned factories, are the temporary workers in an atypical way. Because of these images usually remind us that the city hides a group of incomplete consciousness and the body, they are in the search for a possible survival, a possible aesthetic, a desolate before the disappearance.