Fu-jia’s Home Movie
Director：CHANG Yung-ming
In the summer of 2009, my friend Fu-jia, a lemon farmer, came to visit me and we talked about the low prices of lemons. He just gone through a career change from wedding photographer to farmer and was constantly worried about mortgage payments and his son’s tuition. He asked if I would be willing to make a documentary about the farming industry and find out what has gone wrong. I have never been interested in the subject of farming, so I told him “since you used to be a photographer, why not do it yourself?” So he did. With a DV camera that I lent him, Fu-jia started to film his farmer father, his teenage son, and the lemon farm that he loves and hates. Soon after he started filming, one of the most devastating typhoon, Morakot, hit Taiwan.
Fighting the wind and rain, Fu-jia documented the flooded lemon farm; he also filmed the flooded riverbed, which has been the source of villagers’ livelihood for generations. When he showed me the footage, my fellow filmmaker friends and I were blown away by what we saw. We decided to shoot a documentary about this documentarian and call it Fu-jia’s Home Movie.
I photographed thousands of pictures of Fu-jia, my protagonist, and watched as he rehabilitated the mired marshland and began planting loofahs. I watched as he encountered obstacles during filming; I also saw as the villagers’ battle with the bureaucrats on land rehabilitation. Fu-jia and his fellow villagers have shed a lot of sweat and tears on this God-given land, but they have also been able to reap what they have sowed. Then, just as the land was finally rehabilitated and things were getting back on track, they were hit, once again, with another devastating typhoon on September 19th, destroying Fu-jia’s loofah farm.
In the last 15 minutes of the film, Fu-jia’s footage shows the day of the typhoon as his father scrambles in and out the lemon farm along with other worried village elderly, then the image of Fu-jia’s son swimming in the distance pool, with confusion on his face, for he does not understand what all the fuss is about. As dark clouds hovered above…
About the Director
CHANG Yung-ming is currently a director for The Grass at the Riverbank of the DaAi TV. He is also an instructor in the Department of Communication Arts at Tungfang Design University and Pingdong’s City College. After graduating from Pingdong high school and upon completing compulsory military service, CHANG went to Taipei to be an assistant at a film equipment company. He became a production assistant and learned how to fix equipment. CHANG participated in the production of many short films.
Filmography
2009 Remembrance of an Island
From the Director
My farmer friend Fu-jia borrowed a camera from me in 2009 in order to film the price drop of lemon, and so, a documentary film was born. What started out as an observation on how the farming industry was coping, also became a tribute to his aging farmer father, as well as his teenage son. But Fu-jia eventually put the camera down, due to the lack of understanding and growing stress from fellow farmers and neighbors, as well as the increase of workload on the farm.
To me, his way of documenting seems most down to earth– at times of conflict and yearning– pick up a camera to discover, to document, until one day you are no longer curious. Until you are jaded and exhausted, then you return to the real world, get buried under the minutia of everyday life. If you constantly think you have witnessed something or have something to say, then the process will never end, and you will become a slave to the film. You will lose your life, your purpose, until one day you do not even remember why you picked up the camera in the first place.
Fu-jia’s Home Movie encompasses these two dynamics. I often wondered what is the use of a camera? If we cannot see reality with our eyes, how can a camera? Reality is ambiguous, but these ambiguities captured on camera are very real.