Film Screening and Talk on Laha Mebow’s Heartwarming Documentary Realism

Speaker: Darryl Sterk

About the Film

Hang In There, Kids! (Taiwan’s entry for Best Foreign Language Film in the 89th Academy Awards)

Three indigenous kids are growing up in the mountains. They are all very optimistic, energetic and playful; yet, they are also troubled by family issues. Their handicapped teacher opens an after school session to help them with their schoolwork. For the children, it's like a ray of love shone on them. The teacher has a beautiful voice, but never sings. One day, the 3 kids find a tape of their teacher's recording and are amazed. They decide to bring this tape to Taipei, the biggest city in Taiwan. What changes will this trip bring to their lives?

About the Talk

Laha Mebow’s Heartwarming Documentary Realism

Both Laha Mebow’s feature films, Seeking Sayun (2011) and Hang In There, Kids! (2016) were marketed as “heart-warming,” a word that seems to be the very opposite of documentary realism. In this presentation I try to show how heartwarming documentary realism is not a contradiction in terms. I will argue that Seeking Sayun is actually a sophisticated, metafilmic deconstruction of audience expectations (that nonetheless manages to be documentary) and that Hang In There, Kids! is a brutally honest look at the economic realities of young people’s lives in indigenous villages in Taiwan. I will also try to put Laha Mebow’s achievement in a larger context by comparing her briefly to documentary filmmaker Mayaw Biho and writer Topas Tamapima.

About the Speaker

Darryl Sterk is a translation teacher, literary translator and scholar of indigenous representation in film and fiction in Taiwan. He teaches in the Graduate Program in Translation and Interpretation at National Taiwan University. He specializes in the translation of Taiwanese fiction, including Wu Ming-yi, Shih Chiung-yu, Horace Ho and many other writers. As a scholar, he started off studying representations of indigenous people by Chinese writers and directors, but has now shifted to the study of indigenous writers and directors and to indigenous languages: his latest research project is about the translation of the screenplay for Seediq Bale into the Tgdaya and Toda ‘dialects’ of Seediq.

Organiser: Centre of Taiwan Studies

Contact email: bc18@soas.ac.uk