What lies beneath nature's beauty

LETTER FROM TAIPEI

It was the documentary that left Taiwan crying.

Walking out of cinema theatres, they sniffled - ordinary viewers, celebrities and even the premier's wife.

Beyond Beauty: Taiwan From Above begins like a polished ad for the Taiwan tourism agency.

Thanks to the helicopter-hoisted camera, one soars across the island, looking down on its emerald mountains and sapphire seas and lakes.

There is the magnificent Central Mountain Range, wearing caps of snow over green frocks. Yonder is the Jiaming Lake, or the Angel's Tear, glistening like a teardrop in the middle of a plateau.

But like a horror film, it goes on to relentlessly chronicle how development - guesthouses teetering on hilltops, fish farms voraciously colonising the south-west coast, factories discharging chemical waste and turning rivers orange - is inflicting blows on the land and sea, resulting in landslides, flooding and an island that is sinking ever deeper every year.

Taiwan has lost 1,000 sq km of its land - 3 per cent of its total land area. Even the dead are not spared - graves have been submerged, the narrator tells you. "Our ancestors have gone from land burial to sea burial."

The emotional pull of a combination of stunning aerial photography and a chilling message of how Taiwanese themselves are culpable for the environmental damage to their home has made Beyond Beauty Taiwan's highest-grossing documentary ever.

One in every 23 Taiwanese bought tickets to see it during a three-month commercial run from November, bringing in more than NT$200 million (S$8 million) at the box office. A series of charity screenings in rural areas are ongoing.

It unleashed a bout of soul-searching in the local media and cyberspace, as people spoke of how they were changing their everyday habits while urging the government to take steps.

It forced the Cabinet to convene a task force on environmental issues. Thus far, it has ordered a semiconductor company - featured in the documentary - to shut down several assembly lines at a plant in Kaohsiung after it was found to have dumped toxic waste water into a river. It has also cracked down on illegally constructed guesthouses.

Beyond Beauty, which won the Best Documentary award at last year's Golden Horse Awards, Taiwan's film awards ceremony, even featured in last month's historic cross-strait talks, the first official meeting between Taiwan and China. Taiwan's cross-strait affairs official Wang Yu-chi urged his mainland counterpart Zhang Zhijun to watch Beyond Beauty to "understand Taiwan better".

The man behind it, Chi Po-lin, 49, tells The Sunday Times the overwhelming reaction - "way beyond expectations" - reflects what he believes to be a turning point for Taiwanese to become more environmentally conscious.

It also coincides with an ever-growing sense of self-identity, stoked by ambivalence over increasing integration with China. "We Taiwanese are very vocal about how much we 'love Taiwan' - and it's not just about loving the people, but loving our land."

Burly and soft-spoken, the first-time director started as a commercial aerial photographer 20 years ago, working for advertising clients. The bird's eye view gave him glimpses of the ravages, from mountain land cleared for fruit tree plantations to garbage-logged streams, which ran counter to the conventional narrative about Taiwan's well-preserved nature.

"I was supposed to take beautiful photos, and I didn't dare to show these images. It was like washing dirty linen in public."

Over the years, though, he felt an urge to speak out, and began giving environmental talks in schools. But students weren't interested. "They were sleeping," he says wryly.

That made Chi, then working for the Taiwan Area National Expressway Engineering Bureau, think harder about how to engage them, and he thought of making a short film. It ballooned into a 93-minute NT$94 million feature.

Thus, the man with a fear of heights and who has avoided rollercoasters all his life was to spend three years holed up in a helicopter, flying over the island even during stormy weather.

Over hundreds of days, he and his crew worked on filming mountains gouged out and beribboned with asphalt; and portraying landfills bursting with the 7.4 million tonnes of garbage that the Taiwanese throw out a year, gently chiding viewers that "as long as we don't see it, we think it doesn't exist". Mountain forests are cleared for cabbage fields, "all because gourmets say they taste sweeter when grown higher up".

"When tragedy strikes, we blame nature, but never ourselves," was the documentary's damning indictment.

At a time when Taiwan's economy is in a malaise and people's concerns are over stagnating wages and job opportunities, Chi says he does not deny the need for development. "But there must be a balance. The earth is necessary to our lives."

For instance, he points out, while Taiwan's mountain-grown tea is popular with tourists, that demand must be weighed against the effects of deforestation.

The 2009 Typhoon Morakot, for instance, resulted in mudslides that buried entire villages, leaving 461 people dead and 192 others missing.

"What are we leaving for our next generation?" he ponders.

By bringing what is going on to light and asking such questions, Chi - a father of two - hopes to at least rouse a debate and build some form of consensus.

For now, he is not optimistic that fundamental changes - such as stricter regulations limiting the clearing of mountain land - will be made.

But he relates an anecdote about a viewer who took her five-year-old son to watch the show. She said: "I thought he wouldn't understand. But that night, while I was bathing him, he said we need to be careful in saving water."

Such stories stiffen Chi's spine. While plans for his next project have not been firmed up, a dream project is to do something similar for China, he says.

"The hope is to inspire and change the next generation."

xueying@sph.com.sg

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