Somewhere over the Dreamland

Colour
Taiwan, 2002, 93 min
Section: Another View

Synopsis

Watan, part of the Atayal tribe living in Taiwan, gets a letter. The wallet he lost ten years ago has been found in a block of concrete. In addition to his ID, it also contains a photograph of the wife who left him. Watan heads to the city. Upon returning to places where he was once happy, he recalls a dream about a field of millet. As a young man Xiao Mo had a day job at a Japanese restaurant. He lived in lonely decadence and only he knew what he had lost. One night a girl called him and whispered a love story about a field of millet....“I once went to a tribal village high on the cliff to interview an old man”, says the director. “I listened to him singing and praising the gorgeous view of the field of millet. I set out in search of it. Even though they would tell me that the field was somewhere out there, I never found it. So I dreamed about how it might look in the mountains, caressed by the winds, day and night, from sunrise to sunset. That seemed lonely, I thought, and this was the initiative driving me to shoot the film”.

About the director

Cheng Wen-tang was born in northeast Taiwan and grew up as a typical villager. At age 19 he left to study drama at university and decided to make a career for himself in film. After graduating in 1982, he began working as a screenwriter and assistant director, and shot a series of ethnographic documentaries on video about the lives of natives standing outside the mainstream interest of Taiwanese society. His short Postcard received a special award at the Taipei festival in 1999, and was warmly received at film festivals in Korea, Singapore and Melbourne. A year later he shot Vanity Fair of Tan-Sui for television. His feature debut Somewhere over the Dreamland, awarded Best Feature Debut at the Venice IFF, also took the Golden Horse for Taiwan’s Best Film of 2002.