Goddamned Asura

On his eighteenth birthday Jan Wen opens fire on a crowd at a night market. The reason is not known. The event changes the lives of his family, his friends, those who were hurt and those who witnessed it. From there the film draws a question: if the same people could have made other choices, would it still have happened. The account rebuilds the same event with different choices and looks at whether the outcome would change. That the crime cannot be traced to a single cause stands at the centre. The film does not offer the inner world of the person who did it as an explanation; it also asks about the part played by those around him. Violence is not turned into spectacle; the weight is given to what came before and after. Joseph Huang and Devin Pan appear in Lou Yi-an’s hundred and fourteen minute Taiwanese film, completed in 2022.