Isolated on the coast of Taiwan, living in relatively primitive conditions, is a group of native inhabitants of Taiwan. Modern society has reached this far corner, but wealth has passed the poor area by. Ah-ming, one of the inhabitants, has lived in the big city for some time, but apparently did not make a success of it. The opening shots of the film show him severely wounded after a failed suicide attempt. Ah-ming is saved by an old man who lives with his son Ah-chian in an old mine shaft. The ex-girl-friend of Ah-chian has also returned in failure. She has lived for a while as a whore in Taipei, and makes a half-hearted attempt to take root again in her place of birth. Parallel to the story in pictures on the soundtrack a beautiful old folk tale is told in which the fate of the people in the film seems to be sealed.The specific location plays an important role in The Man from Island West. The beauty of the coast and the mountain streams contrast starkly with the ugliness of the industrial disruption of this landscape. The contrasts between the old and the new, nature and civilisation, city and countryside, are in this film large and in reality unbridgeable.The makers themselves present the film as a ‘rarely-told-but-commonly-found story’. Its strength is not in the technicalperfection, but in the original, mysterious, hard and sometimes aggressive tone with which the film provides a candid picture of a completely unknown Taiwan. The Man from Island West is an intriguing example of an independent low-budget production from Taiwan.
