Hsiao Ya-Chuan: “The 90% of our existence is already determined by our history and where we are from, but there’s a 10% left in which we can alter our destiny”

• The Asian filmmaker presents Father to Son, the first competing film of the Official Section: a work in which he blends his own personal history with Taiwan’s development process

Director Hsiao Ya-Chuan presented this morning, April 7, Father to Son (Van Pao Te, Taiwan 2018), the first competing film of this edition’s Official Section, sponsored by Cajamar Foundation. The film, whose first screening will be this Saturday at the Monopol Multiplex, comes from the director’s desire to join his father and daugther’s stories, connected with Taiwan’s own evolution as a country. “The 90% of our existence is already determined by our history and where we are from, but there’s a 10% left in which we can alter our destiny”, claimed the Asian filmmaker during the press conference he gave at the Pérez Galdós Theater, in which he was introduced to the media by Antonio Weinrichter.

“The origin of the film comes from two aspects that join in a single path. I’m a father now, and I have a father, I wanted to join the stories of my ancestry and my daugther. The second reference is Taiwan’s own history. The main objective of my film is joining both aspects, the personal thing and the country’s history”, continued Hsiao Ya-Chuan to summarize the spirit of a work in which he mixes color and black and white to highlight his use of the timeline.

“I’m aware of the film’s structural difficulty”, admitted the director, who also pointed out that “to facilitate its comprehension, I always use black and white for the past sequences and color for the present ones”.

In a more personal tone, Hsiao Ya-Chuan said that “I understand life in a way in which 90% of our existence is already determined by our history, where we come from, but there’s a 10% left in which we can alter our destiny, in which we can change. The representation of that 10% is maybe what can make the film more complicated. We always have that opportunity of changing our future”, he stressed.

Concerning his relationship with Hou Hsiao-hsien (executive producer of his films), the director explained that “it’s my third film and he has helped me in all of them: he gets very interest in young directors, for their screenplays, and he also likes taking part in the editing”. The producer had already collaborated with Hsiao Ya-Chuan in his previous works Taipei Exchanger -Audience Award at the 2010 Taipei Film Festival- and Mirror Image.

The Asian director pointed out that he already “know that relationship between the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival and Chinese cinema: I think it’s pretty interesting, it explains a lot about the nature of Canarian people, keen to know and respect the other”. Regarding his perception of his works’ screening in the West, the filmmaker added that “as an Asian I see a lot of western movies: if we saw more Asian movies, it would be a great way of improving our communication”.