by Yang Jun-Dah
語言:
English
Photo credit: Film Poster
FEW THINGS HAVE united modern Taiwan more than the 2024 WBSC Premier12 men’s baseball tournament, when the “Chinese Taipei”-jerseyed team defeated Japan to win the championship out of a field of twelve nations.
While a relatively overlooked event for North American fans of Major League Baseball (MLB)—perhaps because the tourney specifically excluded rostered MLB players—those two weeks in November 2024 saw Taiwan erupt into a rarely-seen expression of national unity. The champions received a hero’s parade in downtown Taipei complete with F-16 flyovers, and advertisements from scooters to sandwiches still feature team players as endorsements even to this day.
Rewinding these events is HERO! HITO! (《冠軍之路》), the new documentary directed by Lungnan Isak Fangas, a Pangcah (Amis) filmmaker from Taitung who received his MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. The movie opens with Taiwan’s extra-inning loss to Japan in the 2013 World Baseball Classic—which left an incisive sting among its players, including household names like former New York Yankees pitcher Wang Chien-ming (王建民).
The bulk of the film offers a game-by-game recount of the 2024 tournament, superbly building up the tension and underdog spirit, especially for viewers who did not follow the games at the time. Interwoven around this arc are the personal journeys of several key players from the 2024 roster. Interviews of Team Taiwan coaches—many of whom, including Wang Chien-ming, played on that 2013 losing team—provide further color.
As the 2024 team captain, outfielder Chen Chieh-hsien (陳傑憲) gained the nickname “Captain Taiwan” and remains a marketable face. Photo credit: Yang Jun-Dah
Although the documentary’s structure is fairly formulaic—why mess with a feel-good Cinderella story, after all—its heart really shows with the player profiles, especially those who moved overseas to Japan or the United States as teenagers to pursue a career in baseball, leaving behind family and carrying the weight of expectations and fortunes as mere kids. And a particularly funny aside is how one player’s wedding kept getting postponed because Team Taiwan unexpectedly kept winning and advancing that fateful November.
It’s important to note that Taiwanese Indigenous athletes made up half of the 2024 championship roster, accounting for 14 out of the 28 players. Yet, despite this significant Indigenous presence plus the filmmaker’s own heritage, none of the players are identified by their ethnicities throughout the film. Only one athlete is shown with their Indigenous name—the swaggering Paiwan catcher Giljegiljaw Kungkuan, who does not go by a Mandarin Chinese name professionally. In fact, the only direct reference to Taiwanese Indigenous cultures comes in the documentary’s final shot, showing one player’s mother poignantly expressing her thanks, speaking in the Pangcah language.
One empathizes with this creative choice and the burden on the Indigenous director, Lungnan. How to tell—and sell—a documentary about Taiwan’s biggest team sports win to a domestic audience that is majority Han, who are by and large ignorant of their Indigenous neighbors? Would highlighting the ethnic roots of Indigenous team members draw negative distractions from Taiwan’s famously excessive online commentators? Then there is the risk of fueling the frustrating Han Taiwanese bias of Indigenous peoples as being “really good at sports.”
Indeed, even as politicians from the Presidential Office to the Legislative Yuan attend special screenings of HERO! HITO! this past January, one can compare who does or doesn’t highlight the Indigenous angle in their publicity scripts. Fortunately, Taiwanese Indigenous media has allowed director Lungnan to more fully celebrate these cultural connections, along with more Indigenous-centered screenings and message framing. At the end of the day, having an Indigenous director score a box office win and national adoration is still a needed win.