Anyone seen the movie “Small Station” 小站 by director Lin Chien-ping lately? It picked up an award for Best Short Film at Venice last year.
Just saw it today at the Taipei Filmhouse. It was short, but well written and filmed. Very simple story about a mother and her (mentally inhibited) son watching express trains fly by at a small station (Santiaolin). But in thirty minutes or so the director manages to capture that human and pure side of the duo and put that in contrast with the isolation they are in (literally speaking in the mountains, and figuratively speaking in society as ‘deviants’) More contrast is made between the hurtling express, with all its cold steel and enclosed carriages, and the slow, open carriage, which seems to carry a romantic sense of nostalgia and people engaged in very daily activities.
What do people think? Does it capture that very Taiwanese sense of nostalgia, love and life, which has won such local art-films much praise and prizes abroad?
Shame the movie is only shown for a week at the Taipei Filmhouse…
Didn’t see this till now. Thanks for bringing it up. I worked on the subtitles and promo-sheet of “Small Station” (a combination of translation and editing) for Avan Lin, who is now getting considerable recognition for his efforts (saw him in an interview on cable a few weeks back). The film is good, but sadly working on my bit of the project was no fun at all. I got the standard foreigner treatment throughout - including low pay and pleas of poverty from Avan (I ended-up doing the whole deal for about NT$2000), endless rewrites and fiddling, ignoring my advice on English word and phrase usage, no recognition on the credits, blah, blah, blah. Months after the job was completed, he was still calling me to correct bits and pieces of English totally divorced from the film (including a spruced-up namecard that showed-off his festival win). The moral of the story is, if you are a foreigner, DON’T work on indie films in Taiwan unless you know what you are getting yourself into. No love lost here.
Thanks for sharing that experience, and sorry to hear it was a bad one.
I guess another moral could be: you can be a great artist, but treat people like sh*t
Not sure how much of the original translation you did was changed, but at times I found the subtitles oversimplified what was actually said. So some of deeper emotions/meanings in the dialogue were, to cite another movie, “lost in translation”. Then again, Mandarin is a compltely different language compared to English, in word use and speech.
…sadly working on my bit of the project was no fun at all. I got the standard foreigner treatment throughout - including low pay and pleas of poverty from Avan (I ended-up doing the whole deal for about NT$2000), endless rewrites and fiddling, ignoring my advice on English word and phrase usage, no recognition on the credits, blah, blah, blah. Months after the job was completed, he was still calling me to correct bits and pieces of English totally divorced from the film (including a spruced-up namecard that showed-off his festival win). .[/quote]
Interesting work story. Sad to hear it happened that way for you. Is he AWARE of how he treated you, or completely UNAWARE?
Unaware. But I stopped answering the phone a while ago now, which finally seems to have done the trick. Not everyone is like this here in the 'wan I know, but I do seem to get my share of them. You’re probably right: I should have called him on his behaviour as soon as it started. Thing is, I can rarely tell the difference between someone genuinely in need of a bit of extra help, and someone looking for an edge. You win some, you loose some I guess.
It occassionaly works back the other way: a client insisted on overpaying me for an editing job a little while back. Funny thing was, it was a clean edit - one of the easiest jobs I’ve done. Go figure.
