Mi-Sen WU: Director, editor and screenwriter in Montréal, Canada.

a clip from 10-10, my new documentary

Everyone is this island country sings. A story about an old man kills his nasty neighbour, an alien suspect. It looks the neighbourhood chair is listening to the local AM radio program. In fact, he has been decoded the signals from the aliens outer space. He warns the neighbours that the day of extinction of the earth is coming. However, no body believes what he said…

Just as the circumstances which force Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Beings” womanizing Czech surgeon to flee the Russian invasion reveal a passion for the flesh from a unique perspective, Fluffy Rhapsody's Wan allows the tiny aches and pains of getting old and the fear of death transform his daily activities of job-searching, having sex, pulling his teeth, cheating and idling. Wan is a medical school drop nearing his 30s who starts a relationship with an interesting and puzzling high school girl, Meow-Meow - who claims to be a lesbian. The unspeakable pain of life is represented in this film as "fluff" -somehow light and ephemeral. The film is also a voyage in search of the self. Wan claims, "I've tried to throw out my real self. However, I always feel thirsty and drink lots of water. Day after day, I keep swallowing my real self." Each frame of this film embodies this ephemeral mood through multi-layered music, poetic dialogue and amazing images connected by over exposure, jump-cut and dazzling fades in and out of black. Fluffy Rhapsody treats the banal with a strong dose of fantasy.

It’s the year 1999, the year before the millennium. Hei-shu（Kuroki）, a long-term unemployed man, finally gets a job in a local musical band, performing at funerals and weddings. The irony is that no one in the band can play any musical instruments. One day, Hei-shu’s cat is missing. At about the same time, a new neighbor moves in to an apartment upstairs. Hei-shu still opens the can food for the cat every morning. He strongly believes that his cat will come back some day. He later suspects that the cat has turned into a woman called Yokulut. Hei-shu is a, so called, “Japanese Culture Buff.” He believes that he was Japanese in his previous life and was named “Tetsuo” (the character from a very popular Japanese cartoon). Interestingly, there is a man whose name is also “Tetsuo” in the musical band. However, Tesuo is taking a long vacation and even though Hei-shu wants to meet him, he never does. One day, Hei-shu’s best friend, Tu-fei, lends him a porno VCD, which contains hidden camera filmed sex scenes. One of the scenes contains a 60 year-old woman having sex with a young man. He finds the old woman very attractive and familiar looking to him. She reminds him of his idol, Gao Ya-qi, a female news anchor. He shares a special world with Gao. From time to time, Gao talks to him personally on the TV screen. Later, she also warns Hei-shu better to keep his job. Otherwise, he might be one of the targets of the government’s conspiracy — to terminate worthless individuals, especially the unemployed ones. Later, Hei-shu finds that Gao is also one of them… The crisis finally comes. Since Hei-shu and Tu-fei both cannot play any instruments, they’re afraid to be the next government targets so they try to learn their instruments and follow Gao’s instructions to avoid being exterminated. In the meanwhile, a young man leaves a message on Hei-shu’s answering machine, he claims he is Tesuo and informs Hei-shu that his mother is now pregnant and that Tesuo is the one who impregnated her. To make matters worse, Hei-shu’s mother has disappeared. On the eve of the millennium new year, every secret seems to have a different key to its mysteries…

Kubozuka Yosuke ("GO") stars as Oshima, a young man who wakes up in the middle of a desert with an unconscious woman beside him. She turns out to be Coco, and she relates a story about how Oshima came to his present position: he and his girlfriend, May, were on a road trip to Snow Mountain when they got locked out of their car. May leaves to get help and never returns. Oshima and Coco resume the trip, hoping to find May along the way. A drama about loss and the true value of memory.

16mm / Color/ 20 min/ English/ 1995 2000 Purely16 Indie Film Festival, Taiwan 1998 “The Beat Generation Conference” Special Screening, Netherlands 1998 Taipei Film Festival, Taiwanese Shorts of the Past twenty years, Special Screening 1997 Golden Harvest Award, best film of the year 1996 New York EXPO SHOWCASE Jury Award 1995 CHICAGO International Film Festival, Merit Award SIDNEY MEYERS MEMORIAL AWARD, Best Film, Best Director, Best Cinematography and Best Editing David schwartz, the curator of the American Museum of the Moving image, has described the film as a visual smorgasbord combing editing and content to perfection with a striking and energetic with a rich spiritual vision sewing together three different sections with a stylish non-narrative form. In Wu’s work he attempts to expose the contradictions between life and art by disturbing the boundaries of fiction and reality. Wen-Chung Wu hopes that his film will inspire audience sensitivity to these contradictions. The film is constructed in three “chapters”. The two brief introductory sections lead to the final segment on Allen Ginsberg. In the film I attempted to humanize the legend of Allen Ginsberg. Passages revealing the poet engaged in common act of taking a taxi and addressing a class students present a mortal image of the poet/philosopher. These moments juxtaposed with more familiar poetic vision creates a unique portrait of this legendary figure.

Nothing is more ridiculous than reality this inexplicable reality, Therefore, I decided make a documentary again ... a film which could soften the mind of our lazy and crazy minds and for people who are fond of thinking would find the elephant in the room The threshold is low, so-called ordinary people could easily step in, but they must climb out after watching it. It means that the soul would become richer, and gain a bit of weight ...

The debate on the demolition of urban renewal of old buildings continues with blind mourning; we continue to lose the architectural landscape (memory and life experience) with only the scenes/sets of historical streets. What remains and is seen is only a hollow and nostalgic aesthetic form, and often does not see the true historical context of the local texture. Those that disappear and cannot be seen, of course, do not mean that they do not exist, and they are far clearer than the illusion of seeing. The lens will lead us into these buildings, reminding ourselves that it is not a traveler or a viewer, but a key element in the photo frame. Trying to put you and me in the middle (not looking at the building but entering) the real beauty of the relationship will come to life, and all the dialogue will make sense. By examining these conflict-ridden and controversial buildings; visible or invisible, I try to identify everyday violence and the possibility of liberation of imprisonment from our perceptions.