Voice of the People

After martial law was lifted, decades of industrial pollution ignited social movements across Taiwan. Re-editing material suppressed from broadcast, Lee Daw-ming documents four landmark struggles — from the Hualien pulp mill and Houjin’s fifth naphtha cracker to Tainan pig-farm pollution and the anti-Fourth Nuclear Power Plant campaign — capturing collective resistance and enduring human values of the late 1980s.

Lee Daw-ming: ‘During the production of Voice of the People, I made a deliberate choice from the outset to stand on the side of environmental activists. The film centres on them and is made for them; it is very much a social movement documentary. On the surface it appears to give voice to both sides, but this is a false balance, a false neutrality. Official statements are included only as dialectical counter-examples. If this illusion is not dispelled, it becomes difficult to grasp the film’s true intention.In fact my idea was rather simple. From the environmental movements in Taiwan two or three years before making the film, I selected four cases and brought them together to form a map of Taiwan’s environmental problems. My account of real events is biased — but I also make that bias visible, presenting it systematically for the audience to see.’— Excerpted from ‘A Filmmaker Speaking from the Balcony — Also on My Experience of Making Social Movement Documentaries’, Council for Cultural Affairs, Documenting Taiwan: A Bibliography and Anthology of Research and Writings on Taiwanese Documentary Film, June 2000, pp. 346–357.