Connection by Fate
Connection by Fate (1998} is the third film of Wan Jen’s (萬仁) “super trilogy” (超級三部曲), the other two being Super Citizen (超級市民; 1985) and Super Citizen Ko (超級大國民; 1994). The film depicts the last days of a taxi driver Ah-de, who used to be a political activist but had now lost his faith in politics. He is depicted as a ghost accompanied by the ghost of an aboriginal worker, before he actually turned into one after he committed suicide. Adopting the form of Ah-de’s subjective viewpoint, the film is a complex reflection on the meaning of politics, social movement, memory, and life itself. Plot Ma Le (played by Chang Chen-Yue), an aboriginal youth who left his hometown to work in Taipei, was a construction worker. The construction director’s exploitation of workers provoked him to kill the director on impulse and was sentenced to death. Ah-de (played by Tsai Chen-Nan) was a middle-aged taxi driver who was an activist in the social movements in the 1980s. He became suicidal, ever since his young son’s accidental death. He became a taxi driver and, instead of recording the protests, he began to record his daily life with a camera placed on the dashboard of his car. He often reviewed the videos of the social movements he participated and recorded and got totally frustrated by the fact that they had become forgotten history for the new generation. He had lost his faith in political movements and the memories of the death of his son and his grandfather kept haunted him. On the night he committed the crime, Ma Le happened to take Ah-de’s taxi and left a one thousand NT dollar bill stained with blood. After the night, Ma Le’s ghost often showed up in Ah-de’s life. Taking care of Ah-li, the 19 years old daughter of a fellow activist, who had passed away, was the only purpose of his life. She was a college student, who took a part-time job at a bar. She would like Ah-de to go abroad with her but Ah-de told her it was impossible because they lived in two different generations. One day Ah-de committed suicide by jumping out of the building where he lived as his son accidentally did and became a ghost himself. He and Ma Le wandered in the ruins of Taipei city and an abandoned playground and on the seventh day he and Ma Le went back to Ma Le’s tribal homeland in the mountains to be led to the underworld for reincarnation. Production Connection by Fate Was adapted from Cheng Wen-Tang’s script, The Poet and Ah-de (詩人與阿德), which was also the original title of the film. It was the third film in Wan Jen’s “super trilogy” after Super Citizen (1985), Super Citizen Ko (1994). The story of the aboriginal worker in the film is often linked to the ''Tang Ying-Sheng incident” (湯英伸事件) that shocked the society in 1986, a tragedy about a Tsou (鄒族) youth who killed the whole family of his employer