Highly Recommended
An intimate and award-winning television film is a superb character study about a woman and a city on the cusp of change, led by a phenomenal performance from Ivy Yin.
Toll booths mark the junction between one place and the next. At one point in time, this forced drivers to slow down for a moment as they handed over cash or threw change into a slot. With the advent of eTags, as was the case with Taiwan in 2013, the transition points have become seamless.
When we meet Chia-wen (Ivy Yin), she is one of the last workers at Taiwan’s toll booths. With redundancies being offered before the closure of the system, Chia-wen finds herself at one of life’s tollways. Her son rebellious 16-year-old son Fu Yen-chao (Andrew Chen) is accused of sexual assault, and the parents of the victim are demanding more money than she has.
With industrial action beginning at her workplace, Chia-wen’s desperation for money leads writer/director Chan Ching-lin’s film to some darker places. Chia-wen begins sleeping with lonely (and manipulative) truck driver Wang Chih-hao (Cheng Jen-shuo) for money, and for a time it seems as though there might be a resolution.
Originally produced for television in 2016, THE ISLAND THAT ALL FLOW BY (川流之島) swept the pools at Taiwan’s Golden Bell Awards that year with a whopping five awards. Much of this is thanks to the phenomenal performance put in by Ivy Yin, who also took out the acting nod at the Taipei Film Awards that year. Turning in a subtle performance, audience members will undoubtedly question what they would do in the same situation.
The film is a technical accomplishment as well, transcending the traditional look and feel of TV movies by bringing a grungy reality to the screen. Much of the film takes place in and around the highway and government buildings of the booth, but cinematographer Chen Chi-wen (Sen Sen) adds texture as he bathes his characters in the neon of a bar or the harsh fluorescents of a long tunnel.
Since this film, director Chan Ching-lin has released the short film Is LIFE a Movie, reuniting him with Ivy Yin. The film’s title could easily be the thematic glue that holds THE ISLAND THAT ALL FLOW BY together, and as Chia-wen and her son sit and wait for their judgment at the end of the piece, we might even reflect that we are all one or two bad days away from the many dramas depicted on screen.
2016 | Taiwan | DIR: Chan Ching-lin| WRITERS: Chan Ching-lin | CAST: Ivy Yin, Cheng Jen-shuo, Andrew Chen | DISTRIBUTOR: Taiwan Film Festival in Sydney (AUS) | RUNNING TIME: 90 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 28 July 2019 (TWFF)
