Strawman (1987)

Original title

稻草人

Directed by

Wang Toon

Genre

drama film

Country

Taiwan

Runtime

1h 34m

Rating

7.1 of 10 from 16 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A poor farming family in rural Taiwan during World War II tries to survive under Japanese colonial rule. They struggle with daily hardships and a ridiculous situation after finding an unexploded bomb.

comicbleakhistoricalslow-burnpoignantgroundedwryatmospheric

What happens

Directed by Wang Toon (王童; aka Wang Tong), Strawman is a Taiwanese film released in 1987. It is the first feature of Wang's “Taiwan Trilogy,'' which also includes Banana Paradise (香蕉天堂; 1989) and Hill of No Return (無言的山丘; 1992). The film adopts a comic tone to depict the hardships of life as colonizers in rural Taiwan at the height of WWII. Though not an adaptation from nativist novel like Wang's acclaimed A Flower in The Raining Night (看海的日子; 1983), which is based on the namesake novel by Huang Chun Ming (黃春明), Strawman’s poor farmer family at Yilan’s Shuanglian Pi and the ridiculous journey to deliver an unexploded bomb are depicted very much in the style of Huang's nativist literature. The film won the Best Feature Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay in The 24th Golden Horse Awards. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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