Taiwan Docs

Screening format:
35mm, 10 minutes
Digibeta, 70 minutes

Part 1:
In this merciless universe, everything is expendable.
When the stream of life is exhausted, does any humanity remain?
Time is short - do the gods have any answers for us?
If all will vanish in the end, then why these unending waves of desire?

Par 2:
Legend has it that at he end of life,
we cross a bridge. Old women on the bridge
offer you a bowl of broth, and drinking it,
you forget all. Since the end has been
reached, why look back? If,
at the end of the bridge,
you forget your own face,
then beyond the Door the Yesterday,
will you find your own footprints?
If all is to be forgotten,
when did we actually live?

Part 3:
Babies keep being born in hospital beds; pigs' heads still drop to the slaughterhouse floor. Entries, exits, in this wailing sea of blood. Do they represent life - or death? Do dreams still exist in a gigantic earthquake? Can a poem be found in the depths of ashes?

The Sanskrit word "bardo " means "between" (bar) "two things" (do) -- in this case, it means between death and rebirth, and suggests something vaguely indeterminate, dim, and bearing on life and death. The Chinese title, 垂死造物哀歌 (Chui-si Zao-wu Ai-ge) is borrowed from a text dating from the middle ages, The Lamentation of the Dying Creatures, about the Christian concepts of judgment and purgatory.

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