There are lots of ways to ring in the New Year. Most people go to see the New Year’s Eve fireworks in whatever city they happen to be in. It makes sense. I had plans to do that myself. I was going to hop on my bicycle and ride to the area around the Taipei 101 building. The fireworks were not actually the draw for me. Fireworks are pretty, but they are just fireworks and they are over very fast. More interesting for me was to just be out there amongst the tens or hundreds of thousands of people doing the same thing. I was interested in the event rather than the show. However, at midnight, I found myself not watching fireworks live but watching them in a movie theater. And they weren’t even in Taipei. They were Rio de Janeiro’s 1999 New Year’s Eve fireworks in the Brazilian movie Midnight.

The film was part of the Taiwan Latino Film Festival taking place at the Spot Taipei Film House. The organizers had cleverly scheduled this film so that the New Years’ Eve fireworks scene in the movie took place at roughly midnight on New Year’s Eve here in Taipei. It was kind of cool. I was watching the fireworks on the screen knowing that the fireworks were also taking place out there in the real world at Taipei 101.

I’m sure the experience of seeing the fireworks live would have been better, but I have seen them before, and, even on a bicycle, I thought the traffic and crowds would be a bit much. To be honest, the problem was really Taipei 101’s location and the way that Taipei itself is structured. In my experience, there is no easy or convenient way to get around the Taipei 101 and Taipei City Hall neighborhood. Taipei has a way of funneling you onto the main roads. You can’t really hop onto the secondary roads on a bicycle and make your way across the city. These secondary roads will end at a main road and usually there is no way to cross that road. Therefore, you have to cycle down the main road anyway until you get to an intersection with a traffic light. I used to ride my bike all the time in my hometown and university town in Canada. It’s very convenient because you can zoom along all the small roads and bypass the busy roads with all the traffic. Taipei isn’t really built that way.

In any event, the movie was very good, and I enjoyed myself immensely. Any movie set in Rio de Janeiro is a good bet. The city is so photogenic that any movie set there can’t help but be dramatic and beautiful and interesting. Some of the best movies I’ve seen in the last few years, such as City of God, were set in that city. Midnight is nowhere near as good as City of God (what movie could be?), but it was still enjoyable. It has added fuel to my desire to see that city for myself one day.

I’ve seen eleven of the twenty-six films playing at the festival, and I could easily enjoy watching the remaining fifteen if I could somehow fit them into my schedule. As it is, I think I will be able to watch two more, perhaps three.

At this point, it would be difficult to choose a favorite amongst those eleven. There were some that I wasn’t terribly excited about when I left the theater. Yet, even those have resonated with me, and, days later, I’m still thinking about the characters and the places in them. These films have done a very good job of communicating the beating and creative heart of Latin America. There is an inner life there unlike anywhere else in the world, and you can see this clearly in the movies. They effortlessly combine the practical real world with a life of symbolism, passion, and imagination. Sometimes, you just don’t know if what you are watching is meant to be real or not. Then you just don’t care, and you lose yourself in the atmosphere that the films create.

 

Tags: Midnight, New Year, New Year's Eve, Rio de Janeiro, Taipei, Taiwan