Paradise in Service

In 1969 a young man called Pao from the south of Taiwan is sent by lottery to do his military service on the island of Kinmen. The island sits very close to the Chinese coast and is lived in on the assumption that war could start at any moment. Pao is first taken into the amphibious unit with the hardest training and, when his swimming proves inadequate, is moved elsewhere: Unit 831. This is not a military post but a brothel run by the army. The 831 units were real. From 1952 to 1990 the Taiwanese military ran these houses, above all on the frontline islands, and set them up officially on the grounds of service and morale; the Kinmen branch was popularly called the military paradise. Doze Niu tells it not as a soldier's adventure but as an arrangement in which the conscripts and the women there are both caught. Why the women are there is the heaviest part of the film. It screened in the Panorama section at the Berlin film festival.