Taiwan Docs

While Taiwan was still an impoverished place, a group of people dreamed of a gold rush in Tokyo. And sure enough, there are now more than 1,000 Taiwanese-operated night clubs in the Kabuki district alone. Located to the east of Shinjuku station, Tokyo, Kabuki is the busiest commercial district in Japan. Everything is for sale there, including humanity and faith. With a murder rate 40 times higher than that of the rest of Tokyo, it is a complicated, dangerous place. Over the last 20 years, more than 10 thousand Taiwanese women have come to work in the night clubs here. Each comes for her own reasons, eventually copying the Japanese way of life. Then there are Taiwanese men who have escaped from their own backgrounds, living like shadows among the casinos and massage parlors. For 20 years, these despised women and these invisible men have sent a huge amount of money back to their families, making significant contributions to their ecomonic situation. Yet no one is willing to talk about them, no one knows their personal history, and certainly no one can predict their future. Living in the most dangerous "Someone Else's Shinjuku East", which took 18 months to complete, moves from Taiwan to Japan, honestly exploring humanity and presenting the complexity of the real world with delightful subtlety. True to the spirit of documentary film-making, the directors spent a great deal of time immersed in the lives of their subjects. Gaining their trust through devoted attention and sincere comminication, the directors filmed the protagonists' lives against the backdrop of their complex, tough neighborhood to produce a unique film. Choosing the most moving stories from their long-term filming, the directors present a film that attests to the creativity of independent film-making in Taiwan.

Source: Taiwan International Documentary Festival