Chronotopia 2013

Directed by Bernd Behr

Chronotopia is a film featuring dual English and Taiwanese narrations. Linking disparate twentieth-century Taiwanese histories, it employs an architectural framework to invoke Lee Guang-Hui, an Indigenous Taiwanese soldier who fought for the Imperial Japanese Army in World War II and lived in isolation on Indonesia’s Morotai island until 1974, believing the war had never ended. His return after three decades to a transformed Taiwan—whose language he no longer spoke—casts him as a figure seemingly outside history. His multiple names—Teruo Nakamura in Japanese and Attun Palalin in Ami—mark the shifting spaces, identities, and temporalities that structure Chronotopia.