HOW HIGH IS THE MOUNTAIN
***/****
directed by Shiang-Chu Tang
HOW DEEP IS THE OCEAN
***½/****
directed by Shiang-Chu Tang
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover These are two tangentially related films by the Taiwanese director Shiang-Chu Tang, and they're like nothing else in the Hot Docs festival. They're neither as overly schematic as so many socially-minded documentaries nor overly aestheticized like the school of Errol Morris. In fact, those poles don't really apply to these films, which record social processes through the examples of individuals and which have a formal beauty to them that is totally non-coercive. Watching them, you don't feel forced into taking a stance–you are provided with the stuff of peoples' lives to draw your own conclusions as to how they ended up the way they did.
How High is the Mountain is perhaps the less interesting of the two, but that's not to say it's without its charms. Presented with two milestone events in the director's life (his wife's pregnancy with a new son and his father's stroke), he decides to accompany his father back to his hometown as he prays at the graves of his family. Nothing in particular happens on the trip: father catches up with the brother whom he hasn't seen in years, debates the family's roots on the mainland and in Taiwan, and visits the even older teacher of whom he was a pupil. But the process of returning, remembering, and paying homage is full of nostalgia and melancholy for both the father and the son and reveals both the gravity and lightness of the familial bond.
How Deep is the Ocean is the brief but leisurely telling of Si-Mamnno, an Orchid Island native with a troubled past. Scorned by the Taiwanese for being an indigenous person, he went to Taiwan for work, fell in with a gang, and drank himself into a stroke by his mid-thirties–at which point he returned home, fought his way back to walking again, and resolved to build himself a house. This could have easily degenerated into a patronizing social-worker diatribe, but Tang's film is supremely humanizing. It's not about an indigenous person, but this indigenous person, with specific traits and specific needs; he is shaped by his ancestry but is also himself, not stuffed into a box with others who fit his "type." The film does double duty as a revelation of a social process and a portrait of a person, making it highly unusual in the current crop of documentaries.
