World Premiere | Restored Classics | Out Of Competition
Taiwan, 1998/2K 2025, 123’, Taiwanese, Mandarin
Directed by: Wan Jen
Screenplay: Chen Fang-ming, Cheng Wen-tang, Wan Jen
Cinematography (color): Shen Rui-yuan
Editing: Lin Chih-ju, Hsiao Ju-kuan
Art Direction: Wan Jen
Music: Fan Tsung-pei
Associate Producer: Cheng Wen-tang
Executive Producer: Wan Jen
Cast: Tsai Chen-Nan, Ayal Komod, Chan Hui-chun, Chen Chiu-yen, Li Mu-ming, Shih Chin-chang, Ou Chin-yu, Hung Yi-liang
Date of First Release in Territory: June 26th, 1999
A Paiwan youth, Ma Le, arrives in Taipei to work on a construction site, where he encounters discrimination and exploitation. Driven by anger, he commits murder and is sentenced to death. His spirit, unable to return home, wanders through the city. Ah-de, a middle aged taxi driver, was once an activist who documented Taiwan’s democratic movement with his camera. In the aftermath of his son’s accident and the breakdown of his marriage, he drifts through daily life in a state of emotional exhaustion.
In the landscape of post–martial law Taiwanese cinema, Wan Jen’s
Connection by Fate (1998) stands as a significant work linking the realist legacy of the 1980s Taiwan New Cinema with the more introspective and urban sensibilities of the 1990s. The film explores the lingering impact of historical trauma while reflecting a society shaped by democratization, urban transformation, and shifting cultural consciousness.
Taiwan New Cinema in the 1980s was characterized by a strong commitment to realism. Through long takes, restrained performances, and narratives grounded in everyday life, filmmakers sought to reexamine Taiwanese society and recover historical experiences suppressed during the authoritarian era. By the 1990s, however, the emotional texture of Taiwanese cinema began to shift. As democratization unfolded alongside rapid capitalist transformation, films increasingly conveyed a mood of urban anxiety and existential drifting. Within this context,
Connection by Fate presents a transitional cinematic language. While continuing Wan Jen’s realist observation of social conditions, the film introduces ghostly narration and symbolic imagery. Historical memory is no longer represented solely through realism; instead, it circulates through the city in the form of wandering spirits and fragmented recollections.
If the New Cinema of the 1980s attempted to rewrite history through realist images,
Connection by Fate raises a different question: when historical trauma remains unresolved, how do suppressed memories continue to return within the spaces of the city and the consciousness of its inhabitants? In Wan Jen’s cinematic landscape, Taipei appears as both a physical environment and a symbolic labyrinth marked by invisible histories. The intertwined destinies of two marginalized figures create a quiet yet sorrowful resonance, suggesting the fading embers of political idealism encountering restless souls searching for recognition.
This atmosphere resonates with the broader end-of-the-century sensibility found in many Taiwanese films of the 1990s. In works such as
A Brighter Summer Day by Edward Yang and
Vive l’amour by Tsai Ming-liang, characters often drift through the urban landscape like spectral presences.
Connection by Fate pushes this sense of urban estrangement further by portraying Taipei as a city inhabited simultaneously by the living and the dead. Through the wandering spirit of Ma-Le, an Indigenous youth, the film expands beyond the earlier New Cinema’s focus on tensions between mainlander and native Taiwanese identities, incorporating a broader range of ethnic voices and perspectives.
More than two decades later, the film continues to resonate. As cities evolve under the pressures of modernization,
Connection by Fate suggests that cinema itself may function as a medium of remembrance. By summoning forgotten voices and unresolved histories, the film transforms Taipei into a cinematic archive where the echoes of the past continue to linger.
Pecha Lo
Secretory-General of Taiwan Women’s Film Association
Festival Director of Women Make Waves Film Festival
Wan Jen
Wan Jen (b. 1950) graduated from the Department of Foreign Languages at Soochow University, and the Master in Film and Media Studies at Columbia University. After returning to Taiwan in 1982, he became a key player in the Taiwan New Cinema. He gained success in both box office and reviews from his first feature film Ah Fei, which depicted women’s plight. His films emphasize a realism characterized by social criticism and irony. His “Super Trilogy” includes Super Citizen, Super Citizen Ko, and Connection by Fate. After 2000, he stepped into TV production and direction of dramas.
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
1983 – Ah Fei
1985 – Super Citizen
1987 – The Farewell Coast
1991 – The Story of Taipei Women
1995 – Super Citizen Ko
1998 – Connection by Fate
2013 – It Takes Two to Tango