CAPE NO. 7 (Taiwan, 2008)
Directed by: Wei Te-Sheng
Starring: Van Fan, Chie Tanaka, Huang Hsi-tien, Joanne, Atari Kosuke, Johnny Chung Jen-lin, Ma Ju-lung

Let’s be honest – when’s the last time you actually cared about a Taiwanese movie. Despite turning out such arthouse mainstays like Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang and the late Edward Yang, the Taiwanese box office is as dead as disco. There have been years when domestic films accounted for 2% of the entire box office takings of Taiwan, and so many young directors seem to feel that copying the stately, slow, mannered style of the older generation of directors is their only hope of making it, shooting for play in foreign film festivals and not giving their movies a chance in their homes. But over the past three years, several young directors have been trying to shake things up, with varying degrees of success. It looked like a nice, well-mannered youth-quake of respectable low budget indies that would eventually be collected and displayed in a retrospective somewhere. And then came CAPE NO. 7. Starting slow, it gathered steam via word-of-mouth and soon became the second-highest grossing movie ever released in the history of Taiwanese cinema (TITANIC is still number one). A local, mainstream, non-arthouse movie by a first time director? 

One of the most exciting directors to come from Taiwan, and certainly the most successful, Wei Te-Sheng has deep roots in the Taiwanese film industry. He started his career in 1995 as an assistant grip on Edward Yang’s Mahjong and was soon promoted to assistant director. From 1995 to 1998 he shot several short films including Face in the Evening (1995) Three Dialogues (1996) and Before Dawn (1997), all three of which won Golden Harvest Awards for Film and Digital Video. His first feature film, the critically-acclaimed About July (1999), was honored with a Special Mention Dragons And Tigers Award For Young Cinema at the Vancouver International Film Festival. He was an associate producer of the big budget thriller Double Vision in 2002 and in 2004 he took the first steps towards making his dream project, Seediq Bale. A historical epic about an aboriginal anti-Japanese uprising in 1930’s Occupied Taiwan it required a staggering budget of US$10 million, but in 2004 Wei raised US$7700 to shoot a five-minute trailer for the film hoping to use it to secure the necessary financing. The Taiwanese film industry was blown away by the epic scope and the rich production value of the trailer, but at the time it was impossible for Wei to raise the funds necessary for the project. Instead, he turned his attention to his next feature film, Cape No. 7 (2008), a romantic musical comedy about a local band formed as the opening act for a pop star in the small seaside town of Hengchun.

Stuffed to bursting with colorful characters and sharply observed details, with a cast largely made up of non-actors and with no major stars, Wei had to refinance the mortgage on his house to cover the budget and plunged his family deep into debt in the process. Cape No. 7 was released to a quiet reception and a marginal box office performance, but in the weeks and months to come Wei’s risk-taking was rewarded as word-of-mouth turned it, first, into the highest-grossing Taiwanese-made movie ever released and then into the second highest-grossing movie ever released in Taiwan (after Titantic), surpassing Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and even Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. It was later released in Hong Kong, South Korea, Malaysia and Singapore, won six Golden Horse Awards and was ultimately released in Mainland China. Wei’s next project is the realization, finally, of his long-in-the-works epic, Seediq Bale.