Friday, December 01, 2006

TAIWAN'S FUTURE BELONGS TO ITS PEOPLE: FILMMAKER

Taipei, Nov. 30 (CNA) Taiwan's future belongs to its people, and the people of Taiwan have the right to find "their real selves, " Taiwanese-American filmmaker Will Tiao said in an interview with CNA Thursday.

"Taiwanese have the right to find themselves... because they have never had the chance to develop and articulate their own selves, " Tiao said on the last day of a two-week promotion tour of a film titled Formosa Betrayed.

The movie, which Tiao plans to shoot next year and release in 2008, is about the story of the 1982 murder of a Taiwanese professor who was killed for speaking out for an independent and democratic Taiwan.

Many people in Taiwan have shown enormous support for a movie they think is long overdue, said Tiao, who was born in Kansas and comes from a family with strong pro-Taiwanese independence views.

While stressing his position as a foreigner and trying to stay away from political analysis during his visit, Tiao said he still believes Taiwan's future should belong to its people and that Taiwan is "a democracy that is coming into its own."

"Taiwan is slowly starting to realize that it does have to deal with the past if it wants to move toward becoming a normal country, " he said, adding that people of this generation are probably not as aware of history as they should be.

For a long time, Taiwanese have been told by others about who they are -- first the Japanese and then the Chinese. But Taiwanese have the right to define themselves and explore what Taiwan identity is, Tiao said.

People of Taiwan have to know and reconcile the past before moving forward. Only by doing so can they learn to deconstruct those arguments of "conventional wisdom" and look at the world in a new perspective, according to Tiao, who spent 10 years in Washington working for the Formosan Association for Public Affairs, a pro-independence lobby group.