When Laha Mebow (???) was honored for best director at the Golden Horse Awards in 2022 for her feature film “Gaga,” she set two major milestones.
The 47-year-old Atayal director became the first Taiwanese woman and the first Indigenous filmmaker to win the prestigious honor in the history of the Golden Horse Awards, which were launched nearly six decades ago.
Yet in a recent interview with CNA, Mebow was quick to shrug off those personal accolades, though she was proud that a story about an Indigenous community such as “Gaga” turned out to be “not that marginal.”
The recognition was due, she said, to her ability to translate the various experiences of Indigenous communities, which are not in the mainstream of Taiwanese society, into a movie that most people could relate to, proving the importance of good storytelling.
“A good story appeals across ethnic boundaries,” declared Mebow, who has worked alongside such directors as Chu Yu-ning (???) and Tsai Ming-liang (???) for nearly a decade, at the awards ceremony last November.
“Gaga” tells the story of the Hayongs (??) — a family of eight across three generations — in an Atayal village in the high mountains, and features succinct dialogue and minimalist music throughout the film.
Without the benefit of special effects, the director used her gift for storytelling to get the audience to feel the struggles of the Hayong family amid one unfortunate incident after another and be moved by how it coped.
Family stories speak to everyone, Mebow said, and when people see “Gaga,” they find its plot familiar and approachable, even though it is a movie about Indigenous people.
“Gaga,” however, is more than an appealing family drama, as the director has tactfully woven various issues facing Indigenous tribes in Taiwan into the film’s narrative.
She explores how contemporary political wrangling and regulatory systems clash with traditional Indigenous culture that revolves around “gaga,” meaning “tribal laws” in the Atayal language.
Through scene after scene shot in a mountainous village in Yilan County, Mebow presents the ordinary side of tribal life as well as some of the challenges faced by Indigenous people, such as pre-marital pregnancies, abusive drinking, and corruption.
The art of ‘weaving’ a film
Mebow has compared filmmaking to handloom weaving, a traditional skill symbolic of Atayal culture that every Atayal woman was once required to master.
Weaving demands meticulous planning and undivided attention, Mebow said, and filmmaking requires the same dedication, a parallel that has allowed her to convey her Indigenous background and identity the same way her ancestors did with weaving.
Ironically, Mebow acknowledges having almost no connection or exposure to her tribe or Indigenous issues until she started working at Taiwan Indigenous Television at the age of 30.
She did not even know she had an Atayal name before then, she admits with a chuckle, mainly because she grew up in the bustling city of Taichung, a world away from her native Nanao, a sleepy township in Yilan County.
Mebow recalls that her parents were too busy trying to make a living to pass down family customs, but the opportunity to visit Indigenous villages across Taiwan and film the people who lived in them for the cable TV station opened her eyes.
Since then, she has been driven by a yearning to know more about her origin and tribe, and over the past decade has looked for stories from Indigenous people as a way to trace her Atayal roots.
As Mebow delved into Indigenous culture, more and more stories began to take shape in her mind.
Before “Gaga,” she had made two feature films — “Finding Sayun” in 2011 and “Hang in There, Kids!” in 2016 — in addition to four documentaries released from 2013 to 2021.
All of her works touch upon Atayal villages scattered around Taiwan, with the exception of two documentaries about tribes in New Caledonia, a group of overseas French islands in the southwest Pacific Ocean.
Although Mebow has not exactly been a prolific director, Skaya Siku, an assistant research fellow at the National Academy for Educational Research, said her ability to turn out the feature films she has was still remarkable.
Only a handful of Indigenous directors have worked on feature films, said Siku, who has studied the works of Indigenous documentary filmmakers, during a talk with Mebow at the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute in late March.
Making feature films is a “big bet,” the researcher said, and difficulties in securing funding had typically forced other Indigenous filmmakers to focus on less costly documentaries.
Mebow is not exempt from that pressure, but she remains determined, she said, to use her narratives as a way to give Taiwan’s public exposure to Atayal and other Indigenous culture, as “the general Han people’s understanding of Indigenous people remains limited.”
She was referring to the predominant ethnic Chinese population in Taiwan, which represents 95 percent of the country’s total population of 23.5 million, according to government figures.
Changing the status quo
Indigenous people from Taiwan’s currently recognized 16 tribes number roughly 584,000, accounting for only 2.51 percent of the total population, according to the Ministry of the Interior’s census in 2022.
This lack of understanding, Mebow said, explains why stereotypes about Indigenous people in Taiwanese society persist.
But if the use of Taiwanese has trickled into the daily conversations of Indigenous communities, then maybe non-Indigenous people may also learn about “gaga” and put it to use, Mebow said.
Making that possible is a big motivator for her in making films, even with the financial constraints.
“I hope I can continue exploring [the stories of Indigenous people], although I don’t know how many more films I will be able to make,” she told CNA.
“It [making films] requires the investment and support of other people.”
Recently, the director has begun developing a script about the various experiences of Indigenous women under Japanese rule from 1895 to 1945.
The theme is inspired in part by Mebow’s late grandmother, who, according to the director, lived a short but legendary life during the colonial period.
“I really hope people get to know my [Atayal] culture,” she said.
Source: Focus Taiwan