Connection by Fate
Connection by Fate (1998} is the third film of Wan Jen’s (萬仁) “super trilogy” (超級三部曲), the other two being Super Citizen (超級市民; 1985) and Super Citizen Ko (超級大國民; 1994). The film depicts the last days of a taxi driver Ah-de, who used to be a political activist but had now lost his faith in politics. He is depicted as a ghost accompanied by the ghost of an aboriginal worker, before he actually turned into one after he committed suicide. Adopting the form of Ah-de’s subjective viewpoint, the film is a complex reflection on the meaning of politics, social movement, memory, and life itself. Plot Ma Le (played by Chang Chen-Yue), an aboriginal youth who left his hometown to work in Taipei, was a construction worker. The construction director’s exploitation of workers provoked him to kill the director on impulse and was sentenced to death. Ah-de (played by Tsai Chen-Nan) was a middle-aged taxi driver who was an activist in the social movements in the 1980s. He became suicidal, ever since his young son’s accidental death. He became a taxi driver and, instead of recording the protests, he began to record his daily life with a camera placed on the dashboard