About Cijin: Cijin Island, which is located opposite to the Port of Kaohsiung in Kaohsiung City, has a great mixture of culture and nature. As the local industries declined gradually, young people left Cijin. The Kaohsiung Government tried to introduce tourism to reverse the trend. But without proper planning and presenting characteristics of Cijin, it didn’t work. Cultural heritages died off gradually along with the shrinking population.
RTF Sustainability Awards 2017
Third Award | Category: Cultural (Concept)
Architect: Hong-Fen Lo
Country: Taiwan
Solution
I think feature films can be used to preserve local cultures and stimulate tourism. A movie is a feasible method for collecting element of Cijin and strengthening them in modified forms. Intriguing storylines and famous cast can fascinate the audience and even attract them to visit actual Cijin locations in the movie scenes. Further, tourism driven by this movie following is completely different from general tourism which lacks emotional connection. Movie followers will have a strong emotional connection, to the local people and scenery, once they step onto the movie sites in Cijin. Therefore, I chose the legend of Cijin – 25 Ladies Tomb and wrote a related story by reorganizing the symbols of Cijin, and designed the story’s scenes in my project.
The Legend of Cijin – 25 Ladies Tomb
In the morning of 3 September, 1973, an accident happened in the Cijin Harbor. A ferry, overcrowded with female workers who were afraid of being late for work at Kaohsiung’s export processing zone, overturned at sea and killed 25 young women on board. The government buried them together in the Cijin Cemetery. This tragic accident fueled the superstition of the local people, and mysteries surrounding the 25 Ladies Tomb never stopped.
To the 25 Ladies Tomb, outsiders always showed respect from a distance. To the local people however, those young women were more like their families, relatives, or ancestors, than ghosts. It’s a difference in identity recognition between the outsiders and the locals. For discussing this difference, I created two characters, one of the 25 women, and a young outsider, to represent the locals and the outsiders, and used three timelines to illustrate the shift of identities through time. The past was when the 25 women were living persons. They were still “people” at that time. In the future, they would be more like “deity” through the process of my project, with suitable cultural publicity. However, they are “ghost” at present.
Movie Element – Parallel World
Both characters were in the same sequence of spaces, but in different timelines. Nonetheless, in the scenes which I designed their life chains were crisscrossed. They even had vague sense of each other by vision, sound, and touch. I was trying to create a time model to merge space’s details in two different periods of time. It was also a movie set which could provide movie shooting. Afterwards, the set could be kept to illustrate the mixture of history and modern space to Cijin’s tourists.
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