KANO

In 1931 Taiwan is still under Japanese rule. In the south of the island, the baseball team of the agriculture and forestry school at Kagi has never won a game. A newly arrived Japanese coach trains the team from nothing; the squad has Han Chinese, Japanese and indigenous boys playing together. They come through the island qualifiers, travel to Japan for the national tournament at Koshien, and go all the way to the final. The film runs past three hours and drew large audiences in Taiwan, though not without argument. Some criticised it for looking too kindly on the colonial period; the events take place only a year after the Wushe uprising, in which indigenous people who rose against Japanese rule were put down with great bloodshed, and the film does not touch on it. Others read the sight of boys from different peoples in one team as a story about Taiwanese identity itself. The director, Umin Boya, is from one of Taiwan's indigenous peoples; Wei Te-sheng produced.