Six people are set on a collision course when Jan Wen (Joseph Huang, 黃聖球) shoots a man in a night market on his 18th birthday. The teenager, who spends his time playing the online game King’s World (王者世界) and creating a popular Web comic with his pal Xing (Devin Pan, 潘綱大), is being forced by his strict father to study abroad after scoring poorly on his college exams. As he reaches a breaking point, he orders a gun online.
While society is often quick to condemn such perpetrators (and their parents), the social and psychological reasons leading up to the shooting
Movie review: Green Jail
Huang Yin-yu continues his exploration of Taiwanese immigrants in Japan’s Yaeyama Islands in this haunting ode to the notorious Iriomote mines and an elderly lady who stayed behind
By Han Cheung / Staff reporter
The title Green Jail is presented literally in this poetic, slow-paced and somewhat disjointed documentary. Somber shots of stunning, lush greenery frame the scenes throughout the film, following the final years of Yoshiko Hashima, the sole Taiwanese remnant of the notorious coal mining enterprise that once thrived on Japan’s remote Iriomote Island, off the east coast of Taiwan.
Hashima, who first moved to this “island of death” at age 10, died at 92 in 2018, bringing to a close this little-known chapter of Taiwanese on the island. Not much actually happens in the film, but it’s poignant and visually stunning, a fitting ode to the ghosts of the past.