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HE’S STILL YOUNG

他還年輕

By Jing-Jie LIN

FISFISA MEDIA CO., LTD. - as PROD / PROMO

Documentary - Completed 2022

- Year of production
- 2022
- Genres
- Documentary, Biography
- Countries
- TAIWAN
- Languages
- MANDARIN (TRADITIONAL), TAIWANESE
- Duration
- 141 mn
- Director(s)
- Jing-Jie LIN
- Synopsis
- The poet Wu Sheng, featured in this documentary, grew up in a farming family in Changhua on the west coast of Taiwan. His work is rooted in his native soil, where for decades now he has forged his poetic lines while tilling the land.
  
  In 1972, Wu Sheng published 12 poems under the title of “Hometown Vignettes” in Youth Literary magazine. His mournful cries for the land and deep love of farming communities set a clear tone for Taiwan’s nativist literature. Through poetry collections such as The Soil and He’s Still Young, as well as collections of prose that include Farming Woman and Notes on the Choshui River, he writes of his deep love and sadness for the land, while maintaining a sharply critical eye. He sees protecting the environment as his life’s mission and thinks of himself as a socially conscious writer who is very much engaged with the world. Through his active social involvement, he has redefined what it means to be a poet.
  
  The documentary He’s Still Young was filmed on location over more than three years, beginning in 2017. The crew followed Wu Sheng as he moved through the countryside of his hometown Changhua and made numerous visits along the Choshui River to survey its ecology. The crew also traveled with Wu to Iowa, where he reminisced about his experience at the Writers’ Workshop, and to Vancouver, where he visited his mentor and friend, the writer Ya Hsien. As such, the film provides a moving portrait of the emotion that flows between the poet and his family and friends. During filming, his daughter Wu Yin-ning, who was featured in his poem about his children, “The Burden”, came under political attack for her role in a controversy involving the Taipei Agricultural Products Marketing Corporation (known as Bei Nong in Chinese). During this time, Wu Sheng was unable to write poetry, instead keeping a record of the events as he faced the greatest setback and shock of his life, eventually completing the book Bei Nong Stories. The film is thus a record of the poet’s emotional journey over more than two years, which saw him experience feelings of anger, anxiety, frustration and struggling, then feeling reborn and finally transcending it all—a testament to the ultimate redemptive power of poetry in a chaotic world.