Analysis: Warriors Of The Rainbow: Seediq Bale

18. Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (Te Sheng Wei, 2011)
Seediq Bale is a 4-hour epic based on historic facts that took the director 15 years to complete, and the most expensive production in the history of Taiwanese cinema.
The story examines the history of Seediq, an indigenous tribe of Taiwanese Austronesian people that mostly hunted in the woods, at least when they were not fighting among each other. Their life however, that was utterly connected to nature, was disrupted by the Japanese Occupation, that occurred in 1895.
The protagonist of the film is Mona Rudao, who appears as an adolescent before and a little after the Japanese invasion that resulted in the ruin of the way of life of the indigenous. The picture then flashes forward to 1930, when the Seediq find themselves in a situation similar to slavery, having to work in extreme conditions for meager sums and spending the rest of their time getting drunk. Eventually, a team of youths, frustrated with the situation, decides to revolt and ask the middle-aged Mona Rudao to be their leader. Although reluctantly at first, him and some of the other tribes agree to go to war and stage an attack towards Wushe, that ends up in massive killings of Japanese, including women and children. Subsequently, the occupying forces retaliate.
Te Sheng Wei 's focus was to depict the natives and their culture as realistically as possible, and to accomplish that he went to a plethora of extremes, particularly in the technical