Taiwan Docs

"I carried a copy of Coming Home to the stationary store one fall afternoon, to buy a manila envelope so I could send the tape off to my old teacher, Mr. Liu. The lady at the counter saw the name of Tang Min-Hsiung on the tape, and looked surprised. She asked me where I got the tape. I told her I was the director, it was my film, and then a long conversation started off. I wasn’t sure how to handle the situation.

“Why didn’t he kill himself after he committed his crimes?”; “How can he ask for forgiveness?”; “Yes, what Tu Hua-ming did was extraordinary. It’s very impressive. But you can’t expect everyone to forgive Tang for his acts, let alone the 15 victims. I don’t even forgive him, what about them?”

Two months after Tang was put to death. I couldn’t get the image of the clerk’s spiteful face out of my mind. The image cuts to the first glimpse I got of Tang’s peaceful face. My mind was in a blur.

As an independent film producer, I should be honored that a film shot on such a small budget has created such a stir. But I keep on wondering, what is crime? How should society treat “criminals”?

What separates the plight of victims of crime with the lawful punishment of a convicted criminal? I have no answers to these questions, until I learned about Tu Hua-ming’s “unconditional forgiveness and acceptance” as a way of rehabilitating Tang. Their relationship was one of sisters and brothers, and this moved me. It moved enough to shoot this film with Chu Shu-tuan even though both of us were flat broke.

These images compete with the clerk’s anger, and merge together in a montage. She was only expressing her opinion. I used to think like her, in fact. I’d be unable to forgive him if I was one of the 15 that he hurt. How can the living forgive what a killer has been taken away? But the killer has put to death…..." -- Hsiu-Ching Wu

source: Taiwan International Documentary Festival